Plague
by Crukix
Summary: The end of the world has come. Pokemon and people alike fear what walks the earth - corpses that aren't quite 'dead'. It's survival of the fittest and one creature seems to think nothing should survive.
1. Prologue

**_Author's Note: _**This has been building for a long while in my head. Pokemon meets zombies. Thus, this shall contain gore in all forms. People and pokemon alike will die - and not in pretty ways. There will be blood and guts and like the films; anyone can die. With that in mind, please, enjoy.

_Disclaimer_

**Pokémon **is a registered trademark of Satoshi Tajiri, Game Freak, the Pokémon Company, Nintendo, etc. All trademarked characters, locations, themes and ideas are used without permission in a work of fan-created fiction. The following has been done without profit for purely entertainment purposes. All original concepts, characters, themes and ideas within are the copyrighted property of the author, and are not to be reproduced without his prior consent.

* * *

_**Pokémon**_

_**Plague**_

_By Crukix_

* * *

**Prologue: A Trainer**_**  
**_

Being a pokémon trainer. It's what most children want to do. It's what most people have tried at some point in their life; the gym challenge. Tackle eight of the gyms darted across the country, emerge victorious and have the chance to challenge the league, maybe even the strongest trainers of the country, if you're talented enough.

I'm one of those people.

The brilliant red of the poké ball shines in my hand, letting me know my dreams are within sight.

It's September. Apparently most people will have given up on their journeys by October.

I know I'm not going to be one of those people. I'll manage to go all the way, challenge the league and emerge victorious from it all.

I take another moment to stare at the poké ball in my hand. I hear all the other kids celebrating around me, singing and cheering, poké balls exploding with light and sound as all their pokémon were released for little training battles.

In a way, I feel a little excluded. My friends have already left, I'm meant to meet one in the next town over.

Olivine City.

I'm meant to get there from here in Ecruteak. I've done the journey before enough times; there's loads of roads above the grassy paths that trainers take.

But now I've got my very own pokémon, I can't help but want to wander through the grass. I'll capture another pokémon that I'll train, then I'll use it to take down the pokémon league.

I want to defeat Bruno, the fighting-specialist Elite. He's big, filled with muscles and generally scary.

If I can beat him, _no one_ would ever think of trying to hurt me.

I take a breath and stare out towards the grassy fields to the west of Ecruteak. The trees look orange and little leaves are falling off the trees, swaying in the wind and touching down gently on the floor.

Here in Johto, the people have a saying; "Let the wind carry you in your travels."

The wind's coming at my face.

I pay it no attention.

I take a deep breath.

My heart is racing.

My life beings again here.

I take my first steps as a pokémon trainer…

… and nothing happens.

The world keeps turning. The spearow keep squawking, the rattata keep squeaking and the cars around me keep thundering past on the motorway.

I'm slightly disappointed.

I wanted something _amazing_ to happen. It was how it happened in all the shows; the hero would take his first steps, then something like a bagon would leap out of the grass and challenge him to battle! Or The Ho-oh would fly past, gracing the sky with a rainbow and letting the trainer know he was to be special.

I get nothing.

Does this mean I'm not special?

I shake my head and keep my poké ball tight in my hand. It was cold and clear when I first got it. Now it's covered in fingerprints and is slightly sticky with my sweat.

I'm pretty sure that means I'll be able to throw it further.

A few minutes pass as I travel through the grass. Nothing comes out to bother me. I'm still slightly upset. I want something _cool_ to leap out and challenge me! I could so tackle _anything _that decided to try and attack me! My pokémon would be able to handle it, then I'd be able to capture it!

My heart stops.

I touch my pockets.

Still have spare poké balls there.

Awesome.

I look around where I've walked too. It's a load of forests north of the paths leading to Olivine. I know it. I've been here before. When I was eight some of my friends and I tried to sneak into the big science building hidden away up there.

We got caught before we'd even got near to the building.

I'm sure it won't happen this time. I've got a pokémon now! That means I'll be able to do so much more!

I decide I'm going to see what's there. We all know the stories about science labs; there's meant to be scary strong pokémon made in them that the bad scientists play with, experiment with and make really bad.

It happened in Orre ages ago, Dad said. The pokémon became more bloodthirsty and would attack towns, searching for prey.

I'm sure he tried telling me it to scare me into coming back for curfew. Pokémon were dangerous, we all know that, but they never attack towns. They're smarter than that.

The predators wait around in the middle of nowhere to attack the random pokémon or people that wander into their territories.

People like me.

I gulp and consider backtracking.

_No!_ Dad told me about how he managed to spend the first hour of his trainer journey on his own. He waited until he'd found a safe area, then tried to train his pokémon properly.

That's why all those kids back in town were struggling so much with their pokémon. We all know that they don't understand commands instantly. But when you get a pokémon, you just _want_ to battle.

Nothing happened to him, I tell myself.

That means nothing will happen to me.

_Bang!_

I scream and duck on the floor. It sounds like a car backfired. It happened once before with Dad's car. It scared me and Mum, but he just laughed and said it was because he's a bad driver.

But people aren't allowed to drive anywhere near here.

_Bang!_

_Bang!_

I scream again and begin to run. Something's happening here. Those big sounds aren't meant to be happening near here. I can hear alarms. People are shouting. I can't hear what they're saying. More bangs. Pokémon are howling. People are still shouting.

I want to call out my pokémon for protection. But I haven't trained it yet. If it hears these big sounds, it might attack me.

I'm on my own.

The sounds are getting closer.

_And I don't know what to do!_

I should hide. Behind a tree. Under a rock.

_The sounds are almost here!_

Hide! I need to hide! Where!

_**Bang!**_

The sound's almost near me. I scream again and want to hide. I don't want this journey anymore! I shouldn't have walked here!

_I'm scared._

_I want my Mummy._

The sounds are nearly on me. I scream again and fall on the floor. If I don't move, they won't see me. If they don't see me, they won't be able to hurt me.

"Oh shit."

A woman's voice. She has a funny accent. I can feel her standing near me. She's stopped running. I can smell something weird on her. It smells like those horrible science labs at school; the ones with the crazy science teacher and her creepy ditto. It sits there all lesson, oozing over the table with the weird, creepy wide smile on its face.

I realise the woman hasn't moved. The sounds are getting closer. The big, exploding sounds! I don't know what they are! This woman seems to know. She swears again and I know she has to be an adult. My parents would never let me say anything like that. Dad said he would get his psychic pokémon to probe my mind when I see them next to see if I've been swearing. He said he'd stop me travelling a day for each swear I say.

I want to swear now, but I know Dad wouldn't be happy.

The woman says more curses and tries to move me from the floor.

"Kid, you've got to get out of here!" she hisses at me. Her hands scoop under my armpits and try to pull me from the floor. "Move! You shouldn't be here! Hide!"

She has a funny voice. Her 'oh' sounds are really long. I want to know where she's from. Her voice makes me want to smile.

But her panic makes my heart stop.

She hauls me to my feet and looks in my face. She has a pretty face. It's kind of round, like Mum's. But this woman has really orange hair that's in a ponytail. Her eyes are green and her cheeks are all freckly.

She's an adult.

And she's _scared_.

That makes me even _more_ terrified.

"Oh, kid, get moving!" she growls and shoves me behind a tree. I feel her press me against the tree, covering me completely with her body. I can't see much at all. Dad told me once that if I ever had a woman bury my face in her boobs, I should be happy and enjoy myself.

I'm not happy now. They're stopping me from breathing. I don't know why Dad would be happy with anything like that. I want to get out! I want to _breathe!_

"Here," the woman growls and I hear footsteps come near us. There's someone else there. I can't see them through the woman's boobs. But he smells like her. But like cigarettes too. Mum told me I'm not allowed to try them. Apparently they make your lungs all grey and you need a new pair. Apparently they don't sell them; they take them out of a dead body and put them in yours.

I don't understand that. I never really understood science. I barely made the grade in that. If I'd got one mark less, I wouldn't have been able to come on my journey.

I start to think that maybe that would have been a good thing.

"What're you hiding?" the other person asks. He has a man's voice. His voice sounds funny too. Sort of like the woman's, but different. He reminds me of the people Dad meets in the pub. They sit around drinking something black with a white, bubbly head that tastes _gross_. Apparently they worship leprechauns. It's what Dad told me. But Dad also told me that Santa was real.

He also told me that I'd be safe on my trainer journey.

"This isn't good," the man says, then there's another bang.

"We need to get him out of here." The woman sounds more scared than ever. "The job's bad enough, but we can't let anyone get in the way." She curses again, then there's another bang. "Can we make a run for it? Distract them? They won't find the kid, right?"

Another bang.

"I'm not sure," the man says. "They're getting closer. They moved past us, but they're doubling back. The forests will hide us for some time, but they're on edge. Any movement, any person that looks weird, they're gonna shoot first, ask questions later."

_Shoot first?_

_With guns?_

"No, no, no, no, _no!"_ I scream. The woman yelps and presses her hand over my mouth, muffling the rest of my cries. They're using guns! I see the man. He's hidden most of his face under a weird sort of scarf over his face. I can see his eyes though. They're green. They look angry. _He_ looks angry. He flicks his tongue and I see something metal on it.

Mum has one of those. I asked her why and she said that it made Dad happier. I asked her if I could get one to make people happy too. She looked upset and sent me to my room.

"Let me _go!"_ I shout at the woman, slapping her repeatedly. She won't let me go and I hate her more and more. I want to go! I just want to go home! I don't want to do this stupid journey anymore! These people are playing with guns!

That means the police are chasing after them. The police are chasing after the people I'm with.

They're criminals. Are they going to hold me hostage? Are they going to use me to make sure the police won't take them?

"I want to go _home_!" I wail at the woman. She tries to shush me and begins to rub my head. She tells me it was going to be alright. I don't believe her.

The man hisses as the bangs got closer.

He grabs the woman and me by the shoulders and shoves us into the trees. "We've gotta move!"

I see him hold up a gun.

My heart stops.

He's going to shoot! He's going to kill people and doesn't care that I was here!

"Get the kid outta danger!" he tells the woman.

Then his finger twitches.

And the gun went _bang!_

I flinch and try to run. I don't want to be near him! He's going to hurt the police! He's a criminal! He needs to be stopped!

A light went on in my head. If I could stop him, I'd be the best trainer of all time. How many other trainers stopped criminals on their first days of their journeys?

That was why I didn't see The Ho-oh when I left on my journey. It wasn't that I'm not special.

It's that this was meant to show me how special I am.

"No," I growl and shove the woman. She holds me closer, telling me not to run. I grab her hand and bite down into it. She yells and pulls her hand away, letting me go.

I'm free!

But I need to stop the man!

"Stop!" I yell at him.

I run at him like in sports at school. I manage to tackle him round the waist, but he doesn't go down. He swears and tries to shove me off him. I yell and pull his clothes, trying to get him to stop. He curses again and places his hands on my chest, trying to shove me away.

"No!" I yell. I punch him on the arm…

_**BANG!**_

… and there's pain in my chest.

I let the man go and put my hands to my chest. It's so hard to breathe. I hear the woman scream and the man gasp. It's even harder to breathe. I can't hear much and everything feels weirdly cold.

I can feel my heart pumping faster. My hands are getting wet, sticky and hot, even as my body's getting colder.

I manage to look down at my chest…

… and I see _blood_.

_My blood._

_What_, I want to say, but I can't make the words. I can't breathe at all. My chest hurts. Everything's becoming colder and greyer.

I feel hands cover mine, pressing hard against my chest. It makes the pain worse. I try and tell the woman, but she ignores me, pressing harder. Tears come into my eyes as I want to warn her. But I can't tell her anything.

"No, no, no!" she says in her funny voice. "This can _nae_ be happening!" Liam, you've _shot_ him! You've shot this _wee_ _nipper!_"

I can't see the man.

I can't hear him say anything.

Everything's becoming out of focus.

I can't hear anything anymore.

I'm getting colder.

I've been… shot?

Am I dying?

I can't smell anything anymore.

The blood on my hands doesn't feel so warm anymore.

Everything's gone dark.

_Please…_

… _I don't want to die._

…

_.._

_._


	2. The Exchange

_Case File #1093, Record Number 0796d3m-009:  
_

_Specimen responds well to mental stimuli. Upon contact with a host, specimen appears to remain dormant until host's death. Specimen appears to take control of host's central nervous system and entire body. Further tests needed to determine behaviour of possessed corpse._

* * *

_**Pokémon**_

_**Plague**_

_The Exchange_

* * *

"You killed him!"

She stares at the corpse of the child; the fresh-faced ten year old who'd probably only just managed to start out on his journey. Her hands briefly touch his eyelids and close them before she presses a finger tentatively on his chest, tracing the wound through his heart.

"You killed him," she echoes in a whisper as shock glues her to the floor.

The man glances out from behind a tree and tries to see their pursuers. His clothes are completely black, though covered in a slight film of dust.

"It doesn't matter," he says roughly. "He got in the way. Wrong place, wrong time. We can't stop. We'll get caught."

"You killed him…" she repeats, her hands covered in the dead boy's blood. "You shot him through his _wee_ heart. What was he doing here?"

"_Farrody!"_ the man barks and grabs her by the shoulders. His eyes are burning with anger. She doesn't understand why. He's just killed a little boy. He should be wracked with grief! He shouldn't become angry and try and take it out on her!

She starts to wonder just whether or not she's over her head.

"We've got to move!" he barks. "Take the kid's pokémon – I doubt he's had much of a chance to use it. Probably hasn't even trained it yet, otherwise he'd have sicced it on us."

She can't listen to this. Little thoughts about the kid, what he could have done in his life; what he won't ever get to achieve. She touches his face… his _wee_, delicate face and can't stand the fact he's died without a name. And now she's being told to mug his still-warm corpse! She isn't able to hack such a thought.

"What're you talking about, Liam?" She rises to her feet and presses her face right into her accomplice's. "You've killed this kid and now you want to rob his corpse for a pokémon? Shall we get his wallet too, while we're at it? He might have a few pennies that you could use for a cheap Cherrygrove whore!"

He settles her with a glare so cold she wishes he'd hit her instead. She can deal with violence. But the look feels like he was stripping her of her skin and playing around with every little molecule of her being.

"The kid has a pokémon on his body," Liam says with a careful glance around his cover. Her glances back to Farrody, sees her own black-clad form slowly soaking in the dead kid's blood. He curses and points at the sphere still cradled in the child's cooling hand. "He probably hasn't trained it. Might as well take it under our wing – it'll probably never know that it once had a master. Sides-" he flinches away from a loud gunshot and glances slowly around the tree once more. "Would you want to leave the pokémon in there? What if the kid isn't found for a few weeks? They might be in suspended animation in those things, but I'm not sure how long a young'un will last without feeding."

She shakes her head at him. She can't believe the gall of the man, to pretend like he cares about the kid's pokémon! Sure he cares after his own pokémon, but she's never seen him care about anyone else's.

"_Kelsi!"_

She flinches as he barks her name. Everyone calls her by her surname, they only ever call her by her given name when she's in deep shit. She wonders just how much she'll be called by it if her parents ever find out about what she's been up to.

How much she'll be chewed out if her bosses ever find out about it.

Some undercover cop.

She curses under her breath at him. She loves the thrill of these jobs – they were much more entertaining than paperwork. She's still uncertain as to what job she prefers more… but killing kids isn't a part of either. She's certain that no matter what she does, she won't be able to sleep at night anymore.

"Kelsi, listen to me," he hisses and grabs her shoulder once more. "You convinced me to take this job. We both know, if what we stole gets public, more people are gonna die. This kid probably wouldn't last two seconds if shit really went down. One life for thousands." He grabs a pocket, feeling the unknown vialled liquid that he stole. "We blew up the lab 'cause of what your intel said. We can't let this shit get out."

She hates to admit he's right. She can't let this kid's death be in vain. She scrunches her eyes shut, prays to God that the kid's at peace before she snatches the poké ball from his hand.

"Right," she says quickly and wipes her eyes dry. "Let's get the hell out of here. You remember where you parked the car?" She needs this to go right now. They need to find the car and get the hell out of Dodge as fast as they can. She can't let the police here see her. It's far out of her jurisdiction here, but she can't risk any of them identifying her.

"Five kilometres west, then head down the rocky path there for half a kilometre," he recites even as he fires a quick shot in the distance. "Car's near the miltank farm owned by Goldenrod's gym."

"Right." She nods and squeezes off two rounds quickly, aiming for the trees around the noise. She can't see the police coming at them, but she's fairly certain she can hear the arcanine. She hopes they don't let the pokémon loose anytime soon, otherwise she knows she'll be chow before she even sees the getaway car.

She glances to Liam, shares a nod and takes off running. The forest around them blurs into some unholy fusion of brown and green. Her thoughts remain on course; find the car, drive to the destination, give the package to the contact, get paid.

It should be a simple job.

She mentally laughs at her own naivety. There's no such thing as an easy job; four years with the Viridian Police taught her that. Even a routine drunk and disorderly arrest often goes horribly wrong.

Her body moves on autopilot as she runs. Fire gun. Run. Duck. Weave. Make sure they can't shoot you. They're getting closer. Move behind tree.

She stops and catches her breath. A glance around her cover tells her someone's nearby. She hisses a curse and shoots him as quickly as she can. He goes down screaming, a kneecap blown completely from his leg. She turns and runs, leaves him in his agony.

She can't kill the police. Just in case things go wrong, she needs to have her own job secure again.

She _likes_ being a criminal though. There's the rush; the feeling of empowerment. With the police, she's constrained by rules. She's not allowed to put down the raping scumbags when they slip through the system because of some old-age loophole the priciest lawyers in Johto can find.

What moron really created the rule that poképhillia wasn't illegal if it was a ditto transformed into human guise?

She throws the thought away with a disgusted retch.

"You didn't kill him," Liam grunts as he runs alongside her. "He'll be able to tell them where we're going."

"If we killed him, the police would just hunt us all the harder. They take it hard if you kill one of their own."

She catches the smirk Liam throws at her. "Better hope you don't get dead then. Otherwise both worlds will be seeking bloody vengeance."

Her smile falters for just an instant, but then it's back up again. She can't believe he still buys the lie. She's known him since they were in diapers; he knows she joined the police at nineteen.

He believes she quit when things were too boring.

Sometimes, she wishes that were really the case.

"Don't try nothing then," she warns him with a wink. "Who knows what they'll think of to do to you?"

He rolls his eyes back at her.

Then he goes down screaming as a bullet blasts through his calf.

"Shit!" Farrody hisses, stops running and leaps to his side. She ignores his protests to take the package and complete the task. She knows he's trying to be masculine. She knows that his freedom is the thing he values more than anything.

More than her.

The thought stings just a little more than she hopes it would. She knows that if things did go bad, he'd lose his freedom.

And now they'll have the manslaughter of a child to add to all his crimes. He'd be one of the lowest of the low in prison and she knows that she can't do that to him.

He's a murderer, a thief and an arsonist.

She is too, now.

She can't throw him in prison for something she's also guilty of. She can't throw him in prison full stop. He knows too much. He can ruin her career.

Conversely, her police 'buddies' could ruin her thief career.

She's screwed either way. Her two worlds can never collide and she's not going to let them meet now.

"Quiet!" she hisses quickly. He nods and squeezes his leg, hissing at the pain and worrying about the blood. She works quickly, tears a sleeve off at the elbow and ties it around his leg in a bad, quick tourniquet.

"Stay down!" she barks, firing another two rounds from her gun.

It clicks empty.

Her stomach burns cold.

She can't believe she forgot to reload on the run. She curses the rookie error and shakes her head at her own foolishness.

The police are nearly on them now. She wants to scream, to throw herself at them, guns blazing, just to make sure the package gets delivered.

They may be thieves, but what they're doing is _important!_ She knows the official channels too well; what they've taken would eventually end up in the hands of who they're keeping it away from, all through a few pulled strings.

She's seen the underworld of Johto and knows just how many of her bosses are in someone else's pocket.

"Can you stand?" she asks quickly and quietly.

Liam accepts her help up and stands shakily on his feet. His injured leg wobbles and he nearly falls, saved only by Farrody's quick reflexes.

"No good," he says. He glances back and curses. "They're pinning us down; trying to take us alive." He turns away and looks forward, cursing once more. "We're about twenty feet from the rocky path. If we can make it there, we can lose them on the trail; it's narrow and bendy."

"Right." She nods and forms a plan quickly. They need cover and something to carry Liam out. She knows her strengths; she may be able to carry him, but she definitely can't run whilst carrying him.

"Let out Eve," she instructs him. "She can carry you. Arthur will cover our escape."

He nods quickly. "Alright," he says and flicks a poké ball out from his belt. It explodes into brilliant white light, revealing the snarling creature from within. It looks like an angry gorilla, though is a dark yellow in colour, with multiple black marks across its arms and chest that look like lightning bolts. Its tail is cut short – the brutal scars of a botched operation still visible through the fur. Two long tufts of hair stretch from its face, almost like eyebrows, its flickering ears somewhat resembling antennae.

Its face is scrunched up in a snarl, two large canines protruding from its bottom jaw. It snarls quickly, hissing at the sounds of gunfire.

"Eve," Liam says quickly. "I'm hurt. Carry me to the car."

She snarls with a nod and lifts him over her shoulder quickly. Liam mutters something about 'lost dignity' as Farrody manages a small laugh.

Her own pokémon is out before her. It stands on four feet, with a long body covered in deep black fur. Its tail ends in a devil's prong split, with white patches of fur on its body, resembling broken ribs, with white markings on its head like a skull. Two long, red-boned horns stretch out from its head and its face is twisted in a canine grimace.

"Arthur," she says quickly to the houndoom. "Create a smoke screen."

The pokémon woofs and sniffs the air quickly. A gunshot makes him jump and snarl as sulphurous, black clouds burst out of its nostrils. It takes only a moment for them to be shrouded completely by thick, acrid black smoke.

"Thanks," she says quickly and recalls the pokémon. She turns quickly and chases after the electabuzz carrying Liam. She knows he's instructed her to run towards the car. He's injured now; he needs to get out of trouble quickly.

Farrody knows she needs to cover their escape. She prays the smokescreen is enough. Her hands shake as she tries to reload her gun. Shouts come from behind her. Snarls join in with the chorus.

Her heart leaps from her chest and she prays they're not loosing pokémon on them. She doubts she can take on a police force with only two trained pokémon.

She's just thankful the police aren't shooting straight at them. They know what's been stolen. They know how much shit everyone would be in if they hit the vial and it got loose.

That tells her it's definitely airborne.

It's one of her worst fears about it come true.

She knows nothing of science, truth be told, but she trusts her contact. He says it'll be trouble for everyone, she knows that if it got out, there'd be wide-scale death. He left them specific instructions for the job; sneak in, destroy the lab and bring back the smallest sample available. He made it clear he didn't want to use a sample, but he said if it ever got out, he needs to reverse-engineer it, all in the vain hope to create an antidote.

Far too much pressure, she decides. She's happy just to be doing the grunt work.

She hears the car horn and swears wildly at Liam. The car comes into sight and she leaps in quickly, shoves him out of the driver's seat and punches the keys into the ignition.

"Let me drive!" he demands.

"You're injured," she points out. She sees tell-tale yellow fur poking out from underneath a blanket on the back seat and frowns. She hopes that the pokémon has managed to do her seatbelt up, at least, because it's going to be a bumpy ride.

"The package still intact?" Farrody asks as she shifts the car into gear. She can't let all of this be for nothing. She just can't!

Liam touches a padded pocket on his chest. "Aye," he says quickly. "A-okay."

The car engine hums under Farrody's touch, speeds off down the rocky path and leaves a trail of ground-up dust in their wake.

"Good," she whispers quickly. There's hope for their job yet. "I'll take the quickest route there is. No side roads, you're bleeding out. There's bandages in the glove compartment, do your best. I'll take M39 through Ecruteak to Violet, then Highway 602 through to New Bark. We'll be there in just under two hours."

She sees Liam nod out of the corner of her eye as he sets to work on bandaging his leg. She knows he won't die from it, not unless he's horribly unlucky.

As much as she hates herself for it, she's glad the kid died instead of them. His life to save everyone's.

She prays it's worth it.

* * *

It's dark as they arrive in New Bark Town. Farrody slows the car and drives along the outskirts of the town before stopping a little bit into the woods surrounding the area.

"We're here," she says needlessly. "Fit to walk?"

Liam growls and presses his leg down tentatively. "It'll hold," he declares. "Let's just get in and out of there as quickly as we can." He glances to the back seat and touches the blanketed creature hiding underneath. "Back in your ball, girl. We can't use this car afterwards. Can't have you wandering around with us either."

Farrody watches the pokémon grunt lowly before it disappears in eerie red light. The whole process of pokémon appearing and disappearing is still freaky to her, she decides.

"Let's go," she says quietly. "We're meeting the contact at his lab; the back door will be open between eleven and eleven-oh-three."

"Three minute window," Liam snorts. "How amateur does your contact think we are?"

"Amateur enough to get shot," she bites back. He smirks at her temper and nods quickly, following her in silence.

Farrody is thankful for the silence. It gives her time to plan. After this job, she knows they need to get out of Johto for a while. She has contacts in Hoenn; she's certain she can get some work there. The problem is just Liam; he needs to get to a hospital. They can't risk anywhere too close; they need someone to fix him on the sly.

"_This_ is your contact?" he asks suddenly, snapping her from her thoughts. He points at the sign above the laboratory, even as they creep around the back. "_Professor Elm?_ How the hell did you ever get in contact with him?"

"Long story," she mutters. "Short version; there was a smuggling ring a few years back, kidnapping Johtoan starter pokémon and cage-breeding them to sell to the Trainer Initiative facilities. Kids starting out were getting horribly deformed and denatured pokémon. Took us a month to get it shut down."

"I heard about that," Liam whispers. "Guy I know in the slammer said something about the guy your old lot threw in there. Apparently he got put in the hospital on the first day; guy in there had a kid who got mauled by one of his 'special-bred' pokémon."

Farrody manages a small laugh. "Can't say I'm sorry to hear that." She raises a hand and points towards a heavy-security metal door. "There's our entrance. Time?"

"Eleven, on the dot."

She nods. "Good. Keep the package hidden until the deal's sealed – Elm's buddy-buddy with a lot of the officials; I'm still not sure if this job could turn sour or not."

He just gives her a blank look. "I got _shot_. I'd say it's gone pretty sour already."

"Quiet," she hisses as she cracks the metal door open. "It's far _too_ quiet."

Liam's hand reaches for his gun instantly. "You smell that?" he asks.

Her face twists into a grimace as her stomach drops. Blood. She doesn't need to confirm it; they both know what it means. Someone's been murdered in there. No small spill would create such a strong smell. The air is hot and sticky as they creep inside, the buzzing of small insects giving sound to the deathly quiet lab.

They round a corner and find a large work station, computer lit up and many screens above it, all smashed and blinking randomly. A wheeled chair sits before the desk and a hand drops limply by the side.

What they see most is the blood splattered over the screens and pooling around the chair.

"Elm," Farrody whispers as she checks the body. His neck is torn open, wound still slightly fresh. His eyes are glassy and his head leaning back, not a defensive wound marking his body, she notes. Whoever did this did it quickly and quietly. Instantly the policewoman in here is forming the conclusions; a professional hit or a close betrayal.

"So much for our money," Liam grunts. "Who do we deliver the package to now?"

Farrody hisses a curse and thinks as quickly as she can. "Professor Oak, maybe. He trained Elm, maybe they were in correspondence about this job?"

"Maybe Oak set this up then," Liam grunts. "We better get out of here before-"

Police sirens suddenly blare from outside, filling the dark lab with flashing blue lights.

"-That happens."

Farrody curses the air bluer than the lights as she realies how trapped they are. Their three-minute window for the back door has expired. They can't get out that way. The front door is being swarmed. There's an apartment above the lab; she hears footsteps thumping on the ceiling. She knows that has to be police.

She glances towards Elm again and figures he was probably killed roughly when they stole the package. Whoever did this set them up; they knew they'd be delivering straight to Elm. Otherwise the police wouldn't be hiding with a dead body on show.

She realises then and there that it's an inside job; someone in the police has set this up. Maybe the Superintendent, the Chief of Police… _anyone._

She can't think about that now. She needs to get out. Her worlds are about to clash and she can't let that happen.

"Windows?" she asks quickly.

"Barred shut," Liam tells her. "Whoever did this knew what they were doing. We're blocked in completely." He grabs all three poké balls between his fingers and glances around the room, his head jumping about like a curious pidgey. "We're caught like rattata. Can we dig our way out?"

"Steelix-grade metallic flooring," Farrody says, her boots tapping the floor in demonstration. "Only way out is through the police." She listens quickly and curses once more. "Sounds like it's the whole of the Eastern Johto force. Unless you want to be torn apart by machine guns, that's a no-go. The pokémon here won't listen to us either. So using a flyer from here is out of the question."

Liam glances towards the ceiling. "Through the apartment. It's our only option. Take out the cops up there, run out the window. Maybe use some of the pokémon here as protection."

She nods. "Good plan." She runs towards the shelves lined with pokémon, glancing through them quickly. They need bigger pokémon to shield them, but not something too big for them to fight off if things go wrong. For the first time since things went wrong, she's confident they'll be able to get out of this all unscathed.

Then something cold and metal presses into the back of her skull.

"Don't. Move," the person growls.

She feels her heart sink and bile rise into her throat all at once. Behind her she hears cursing and the sounds of a fight; she knows Liam's attempting to fight them off. A loud crack hits her eardrums. She hears Liam scream. She knows they've broken something. She knows she's failed her task. The package is going to get compromised.

All of their work was for nothing.

But worst of all; she knows she's fucked up enough for her worlds to collide. One or both sides are going to be pissed at her; she doesn't know what ones will be worst.

She hears the tell-tale sounds of metal handcuffs.

"Liam O'Brien, I'm arresting you on suspicion of the murder of professor Elm, in addition to theft, terrorism, trespassing, in addition to multiple counts of theft, arson and murder."

Farrody feels herself flinch as Liam grunts in pain. She knows she's defeated, but she declares to herself that they'll find a way out.

They know Liam's name and his crimes. They were only in the other lab a few hours ago. There's no way that the police can have collected all that information in time.

She knows for certain that it was an inside job. Someone waited until they'd completed their task, all so they could get their hands on the package and sell it off to the highest bidder.

She relaxes a little as the gun pulls away from her head. Her body tenses once more as handcuffs slip around one of her wrists, then her arms screams in protest as they're yanked behind her.

"Kelsi Farrody," the man behind her grunts. "You're under arrest for-"

"All the same things, right?" she says cockily with a roll of her eyes. She hears the man hiss in annoyance and feels a small smirk on her face despite the situation. She glances back and sees Liam already out of earshot before her head is shoved back to facing the shelves.

"Eyes forward, murderer."

Her face is nearly slammed into the metal shelves in front of her. She tries to figure out just who this cop could be; if he is so intent on making so she doesn't see him. He's either new or high-up, probably with higher and more powerful clearance than her.

It has to be the latter. She knows they wouldn't let someone new in on a job like this.

She forces herself to remain calm. Her only option now is to reveal who she is; she just hopes that these police are clued-in enough to not break her cover. It's the only way she can get her and Liam's arses out of the firing line.

"You know my name," she says quickly and quietly. "That means you know who I am. Check in with Kanto Yard. I'm an undercover police officer."

The man behind her snorts and shoves her other wrist into the handcuffs. "Yeah right, heard that one before. Tell me then; who's your superior?"

She can practically hear the threat in his words; say Officer Jenny and I'll shoot you on the spot.

"Charles Gall," she says. "He's my superior and head of my operation. Want me to list all the people on my team; all those that have clearance enough to know about my case?"

The police man grunts once more, completely un-amused. "Don't push your luck. I'll check your story out when we get back to the station. Until then, you're remaining under arrest."

"Fine," she says quickly. "I need you to do that regardless; if Liam twigs that I'm undercover and your case falls through, everything I've done is for nothing."

Though she's slightly certain everything may be for nothing anyway.

* * *

The bleach-white walls are the same in every police station, she notes. Farrody rubs her aching wrists as she sits across the desk from the policeman that arrested her; one Detective Harrison of the KJBI – the KanJo Bureau of Investigation.

"Our clearance far outranks yours," he says to her. His face is one that she can't help but hate; he has a twitchy nose and small squinty eyes, like a rat, with a pencil thin moustache and a hairline thinner than his milk-catcher. "We've been after the suspect for more than six months, you yourself too."

She manages a small shrug. "I did what I had to, sir. Although you think him nothing more than a thug, Liam is damn smart. I've known him since we were little; we grew up together and he knows me better than anyone. I know him more than anyone; that's how I managed to get in on this case. I got closer to him than anyone, but it came with the compromise that he could read me so easily he would guess if something was amiss."

"Murders and grand theft auto usually aren't covered by the limits of undercover work," the KJBI agent tells her.

Rules and regulations within five minutes of conversation. This is why she wanted out of the police in the first place.

"I know, sir," she says quietly. "But it was the only way to get close to him and his contacts. I managed to get details of fifty-three people he deals with – he wouldn't even trust me with the details of the jobs we did for the first few weeks. I made sure never to kill an innocent; everyone I shot was always a drug-dealer, a pimp or something worse. I had to carry out those murders, sir, to make sure we have evidence to bring down the big players in KanJo."

All his anger washes away suddenly, replaced by intrigue. Farrody smiles to herself, knowing that at least she has a leg to stand on now.

"And you have names of these people, I assume?" he asks quickly, leaning in towards her.

She nods and keeps her cool as she pulls away from him as subtly as she can. She's uncertain as to whether his intrigue is through a devotion to his career or whether he's in the pocket of someone she's able to expose.

"Of course," she says confidently. "But of course, you'll only be able to see the names in the report I need to submit to my superiors. If something were to happen to me before then, it only points at a double-agent inside the police, as only people in the force have any idea of what I know."

Harrison's eyes narrow on her instantly. "Are you accusing me of being in someone's pocket?"

She ignores the boiling terror in her heart, hoping his shock and anger at the accusations are genuine. "I'm saying that I don't trust you, sir. My undercover work has shown me that you can't trust other people, no matter their position. I've seen people sell their own children to get ahead in the underworld sir, just because you're a KJBI agent doesn't earn you my trust."

He scrunches his face up a second before he sighs and leans back. "Very well. The Viridian police department have arranged a helicopter transport for you that will arrive in an hour. You're expected to attend a debriefing before writing and submitting your report, upon which you can resume normal work."

"Okay," she says. "If I may, sir, I would like to see Liam first. He saw the other officers removing me from my cell and I have a feeling he's figured it all out by now. I need to talk to him, if only so I can calm him down. Otherwise he may just become a loose cannon that will be perfectly eligible for an insanity plea."

She sees the reluctant acceptance in his face and knows she's won. She needs to see Liam, to hope that he hasn't figured it out. If he hasn't, she may still be able to convince him she's working against the police and is able to spring him free.

Honestly, she's still uncertain as to whether that's true or not. Either decision will ruin her. She just needs to choose the one which will cause the least damage.

She finds Liam stewing in his cell, glaring manically at the small slot in the metallic door. She knows instantly by that look he's not just angry; he's furious. His face-mask is gone, revealing the short brown hair that seems to be dripping into his face and the five o'clock shadow that's on its way to becoming a beard.

"You _bitch,"_ he hisses dangerously.

He knows, she realises. Her heart sinks and she knows there's no way to recover. All she's done for the past few months is for nothing; the time an energy she spent getting to know Liam again, befriending him and actually enjoying her life for once - she sees it ripped away from her grasp in those two words.

She steps closer to the jail cell. "Liam, I-"

"Don't even try to explain yourself," he cuts her off with a dark growl that sends shivers down her spine. "You tricked me. You spent all that time getting to know me, pretending to be my friend and doing the _'right'_ thing, but it was all a lie! You got close to me, all so you could advance in your silly little career!"

She shakes her head and feels the tears already on her face. "No, that's not what it was at all!"

He snorts. "Like I'll believe anything you say. Do yourself a favour Kelsi; enjoy what you've got left of your life, 'cause I promise you; as soon as I get out of this place, I'm going to find you. I'm going to find you and I'm going to rip your lying tongue right out of your _fucking mouth!_

"So enjoy yourself, bitch," he says as he crosses his legs, his face becoming a picture of horrifying calm. "Clock's a-ticking."

Farrody backs away quickly and slams the little metallic flap of his cell door shut. Her hand squeezes her chest, trying in vain to mend her broken heart. She's certain her soul has been torn straight out and stomped upon.

Everything she's done in an attempt to change her life has led back to nothing. Now she has lost the damn package and had no clue what to do to find it again.

"Cheer up," says the officer standing guard nearby her. "It's not the end of the world."

* * *

The woman screams her lungs out. She runs, fear pumping through her veins. She's going to die, she's certain of it. She saw their faces – _dear God their faces!_ It looked like they'd been ripped straight off – gooey flesh and bone exposed to the world, the person underneath not caring that maggots were crawling around and eating the flesh.

She runs out of her house and straight into the street, praying that someone is left to help her. The world has fallen apart, people are dying and she has no idea what the hell's going on any more.

"Get away!" she screams at the _thing_ lumbering after her. It can't be human! It shouldn't be walking! It just shouldn't exist!

She stops running suddenly, bumps into something and feels all the breath leave her lungs.

She looks up and prays that it's not another decaying _thing_ come to kill her.

It's a human, she finds out with a sigh of relieve.

Then his face _explodes_.

She screams again, leaps backwards and spits blood from her mouth. Her face is covered in blood. Her heart is thundering beneath her breath. That man, the man who was just stood before her falls to the floor, blood flowing free from his headless neck.

Little rattata scamper towards it instantly. Their little bodies are dead and exposed – ribs, skulls, organs and bone, all different on each pokémon, but all mark them as dead.

"No," the woman begs, disbelieving. "This isn't happening!"

She runs. It's all she can do now. The smell of death surrounds her. The _things_ stalk after her in the midday sun; shambling towards her, arms hanging limply by their sides and moans coming out of their broken, bloody mouths.

Her heel snaps on the pavement and she falls forwards. She screams at the shock of it all, slips out of her stupidly high heels and throws them at the nearest thing stalking her.

She runs again. Her lungs are burning. Her heart is racing. Her blood is burning cold. She knows she can't run much longer. But she has to. She needs to survive. Those things broke into her home and _ate_ her husband! They tore his stomach open then and there and feasted on his entrails, even as he lay screaming and dying beneath them. Their greedy hands kept grabbing and _ripping_ at his body until there was nothing left but gooey flesh and bone.

Then he groaned and stood back up again, his intestines dropping to the floor and his lower jaw missing from his body.

She doesn't want that to happen to her. She hasn't saved her husband, but she can save herself.

She stops for breath in the middle of the busy street, leaning on a car abandoned in the middle of the road. She's unsure where she can go; how she can survive.

Then something grabs her ankle.

She screams and stamps down on it, but it's too late.

More hands grab her legs. They pull at her, ripping, tearing her skin from flesh and meat away from the bone. Pain blossoms up her legs; she screams bloody murder. The hands pull her to the floor, her face smashes into the pavement and dazes her. She barely registers the pain anymore as she slowly gets dragged underneath the car, greedy arms plundering her flesh.

Fingers probe her body, tear bones from her flesh, snap her bones and bring them to greedy, salivating mouths. The cannibals around her dying body moan in delight as blood trickles down their dead, dry mouths.

The last thing she sees is the rotting face of their local priest.

Then with a final sigh, she dies.

Two minutes later her corpse shambles out from underneath the car and rises back to its feet, moaning incoherently. Exposed bone snaps and brings her back to her knees, but she feels no pain. All she feels now is hunger. She needs to eat, sweet, fresh, untainted meet.

All around Johto, people scream for their lives as the dead rise and begin feasting on the living.


	3. After the Fall

_Case notes from Dr Redlum, Mossdeep Science facility._

_Log 0-6-9-3._

_January 31, 3007.  
_

_Reports of strange, alien life occuring near vicinity of Veilstone City. Extraction teams only able to find sample of red-green liquid._

_Further analysis required of liquid._

_It responds well to psychic probing._

_Could this be proof of intelligent, extra-terrestrial life?  
_

* * *

_**Pokémon**_

_**Plague**_

_After the Fall_

* * *

The first thing he notices is that the entire town is empty.

The second thing is that it looks like the apocalypse has hit it.

Gregory Linux fiddles with his belt nervously as he glances around the town, his brain full of questions as to what's happened.

He remembers passing through this little village a month ago. A small settlement at the base of Mount Silver, full of farmers and workers of the land that had pokémon strong enough to fight off the local feral creatures…

… a settlement that is now in ruins.

He glances around broken windows, boarded up doors and drag marks –they're human! - along the ground and can't help but fear what may have happened here. He's never seen anything like it. He's only been training inside of Mount Silver for a month; this looks like something out of a horror film! His mind is abuzz as it creates many different scenarios of what could have happened.

He realises it looks like something –someone?- invaded the town. He remembers history lessons in school, where people would invade towns and capture their women and pokémon, often making slaves out of them and the men – if they didn't kill them first.

He remembers that history says those practices stopped almost a millennia ago. It's unreal to believe something like that could have happened.

Then he sees the blood stains.

Smears of dried blood paint the ruined grass and the outsides of buildings. He can see bloody handprints –are those children's?- around doors, a lamppost, on a bench like someone was holding on desperately, trying not to be dragged away.

His stomach does a funny, cold little dance at the thought. The settlement here is under protection by the Elites of KanJo, he's certain. In fact, he's certain that Karen of the Johto Elites is meant to be from this little safe haven. No one in their right mind would have invaded them.

He tells himself it's not like he could have missed the start of a war. He was deep inside Mount Silver for a month, he's certain of that. One time he was even sure he came across a fiery feather of The Moltres.

He's slightly convinced that he's dreaming everything from that point onwards. He tells himself it's likely that he's fallen asleep somewhere in the caves –not much of reassurance- maybe through a feral pokémon, maybe through one of his own. He's having one of those strange dreams where it feels like years of your life are passing by.

Something creeps along behind him. Shadows pass by his back, slowly drawing closer.

He pays them no mind as he treks towards the pokémon centre.

He notices first that the red roof is missing.

He doesn't notice how close the shadows get.

He sees that the windows are broken. He sees blood smears underneath the window. He's sure he can straight inside the window; he can see little bits of a body inside.

Seeing that makes him need to hurl. He tells himself it's not what he thinks it is. He can't see it well anyway.

He doesn't see the shadows move closer either.

He tells himself that he should check the pokémon centre properly. There might be records of what's happened in there. There may even be survivors.

He knows instantly that's a bad idea. He's seen enough horror films to know that inspecting a broken, attacked building is a one-way ticket to death.

He's not savvy enough to notice the creature until it's almost upon him.

Something hisses. Warm, hot breath touches the back of his neck.

He screams and leaps a foot into the air.

"Fuck me!" he hisses as he sees the creature.

Green, scaly skin covers the pokémon. It stands on two legs and stares at him with two large, yellow reptilian eyes. Its long tail looks like a fern and little yellow seeds are dotted along its back. On each elbow is a long, flat leaf that looks as sharp as a blade and its reptilian head twitches as Gregory waves a hand at its face.

"_Sally!_" he near-enough shouts at the pokémon. "Are you _trying_ to kill me? Have you not seen what's happened here? It looks like everyone's been slaughtered. Tell me you've gathered an idea of what's been going on?"

The sceptile twitches once, her long tongue flicking out of her mouth once.

Gregory sighs and runs a hand through his hair. "Not an idea then?" He shakes his head and glares at the abandoned village. "Shit. We're gonna have to check somewhere. People in Johto are gonna have to know that something's gone down here. If not, we've gotta make sure we've got something we can show them."

He laughs nervously as he glances back towards the pokémon centre and eyes the wrecked facility warily. "We're going to have to go into there then. You know how it is; the computers are linked up to their own internal server. It something bad happened, someone's going to have been able to send out a call for help, right?"

The pokémon hisses twice, stamps a foot on the ground and then growls at the pokémon centre.

"You're right," Gregory admits with a sigh. "Unless they attacked there first. But if it's been ransacked, there should be food there. We're running low. All trainers know the same thing; something bad happens, head to the pokémon centre for safety and security. The one up here's fortified to protect against tyranitar attacks… what the hell could have managed this?"

Sally growls once more, her body presses low against the ground and she skulks towards the pokémon centre. Her trainer is alert instantly; he knows the changes in his pokémon. He knows where they're hunting and when they're playing.

Right now, he knows his pokémon is expecting something to attack them.

He argues with himself and loses easily. He shouldn't go in there. Every fibre of his being argues against it. Even his pokémon seems wary of the place.

He takes a breath and makes his way towards the pokémon centre. He finds out quickly that the automatic doors are locked shut, as well as barricaded shut with tables and chairs –not a reassuring sign. It looks like the windows once had the same treatment, but something broke through them. He frowns; it doesn't look like a pokémon attack. It's too organised for that; almost like something was hunting specifically in the pokémon centre.

_What could have caused this?_

The one thought revolves in his brain like a bullet train on a circular track. He needs to find out what's happened. He's never been one to interfere with the law or act the hero; most trainers weren't, despite what the cartoons and shows always said. But even so, he's still a decent person. He knows that if something bad had truly happened, he should help out. He's the one with the powerful pokémon, after all.

He finds a small gap in the window and shuffles himself in, minding the broken glass. Sally hisses once after him. He throws a glance towards his pokémon and manages a small smile before he recalls her into her poké ball. As soon as he's able to, he releases her once more, ears burning and stomach dropping at the explosive noise it makes.

"I need silencers for these things," he whispers to his pokémon. He knows she has no real opinion on the matter, but he needs the semblance of conversation. The whole place is just too _eerie_. It's like everyone inside was killed in some gruesome manner.

When he sees the bloodstains covering the floor, he's certain people have been massacred.

Sally drops to all fours once more and sniffs a pool of dried blood. Instantly she leaps back up, hisses wildly and scratches at her nose.

Gregory has no idea what that means. He's never seen her react like that to something. He guesses that something's happened to the blood. He has no idea what though; he was never really a scientist, after all. Like most trainers, he qualified from school with the basics he needed. He never went back into education again either; he was one of the few able to keep journeying, whilst others dropped out.

"Let's find the computer terminals," he decides quickly. "I don't like the idea of raiding the store cupboards anymore. Something's wrong in this place."

He isn't sure what it is, but something _screams_ at him that there's evil in the pokémon centre. He knows to trust his instinct. Ever trainer learns to rely on it once it has been honed to a certain point.

His body tells him to run and he knows he should. But he needs to know what's happened. He needs to know what's out there. He needs to know what he needs to run from. He rubs his tongue along the back of his teeth and tastes the remains of toothpaste. He wonders idly how strange it was, that he was brushing his teeth in a small pool of rainwater this morning, like routine. Now he's unsure if he's going to find somewhere safe enough for something so mundane again.

He glances behind the reception counter and sees the remains of… _something_.

Instantly he wishes he hadn't looked.

His stomach does a weird dance at the sight of the mangled body in front of him. He's unable to see much of what the person looked like –isn't that meant to be on the inside? -; he can only see the bright blue scrubs that mark the person as a nurse from the pokémon centre.

"It's like… something _ate_ him...her… _it_." He takes a step away from the remains of the body and stares towards the corridor leading to the computers. His sceptile growls as she skulks along the corridor, her posture twisted into a strange defensive stance.

Gregory sees that and worries even more. They've spent a month in Mount Silver; he was used to watching her take on the dangerous creatures in there without a second thought and with all the confidence in the world.

Whatever's happening is sapping her of all that confidence. He considers releasing another pokémon to join them. He knows it would only give them less space to fight in. The noise would probably attract something else towards them too.

He can't do that, he decides. He has to risk it with just Sally by his side. Maybe he'll be lucky and they'll find nothing. Maybe he'll be unlucky and they'll find what's able to cause such carnage.

"Take this first right," he tells his pokémon quickly. His eyes follow the blood smears across the walls and sees that more pokémon –is that a beak? - might have been dragged to their deaths. He snatches a metal pole from the floor and winces at the metallic clang it makes against the empty hallway walls. He feels paranoid – every breeze, every little noise and shadow makes his heart stop and his stomach leap from his chest. Sally is the same – he's never seen her leap so much at every little sound. He's slightly concerned she might take his head off in her own fearful attacks.

There are little bits of damage that pepper the walls. Gregory sees burn marks, pock marks missing bricks and plaster boards. Pokémon have obviously been attacking something in the hallways.

It feels like they carry on forever. They finally reach a room and enter it apprehensively.

Instantly Gregory wishes he hasn't.

He knows that in the more remote locations, the pokémon centres can sometimes double up as emergency hospitals for people too. A lot of pokémon injuries come with human casualties, which made the local governments decide on the merges.

Gregory never once considers there are maternity wards in such places.

But know he sees _very_ differently.

And he prays to whatever God that's listening he's just dreaming.

There are little cots lining the entire hall. Six rows with twelve cots, all of which contain a little baby recently born into the world.

He sees that they've been recently taken from it too.

"Fuck," he whispers just before he throws up in the corner. There's little bits of meat and bone thrown askew everywhere. What remains of the babies isn't enough to fit into a pint glass.

He can't formulate any other words before he runs out of the room, still retching and coughing. His pokémon skulks along behind him as she keeps watch. He can't face turning round to her or even looking back to the room. Throughout all the horrors he's ever witnessed, he's never seen anything as bad as that.

The images still play on his mind –blood, _so much blood! _-and make him lose his lunch again. He can't understand how anything, anywhere could ever do something like that. He's never heard of anything that can or _would_ coordinate an attack on a pokémon centre.

"_Uuurrgh."_

Gregory leaps into the air at the sudden sound as his sapphire eyes search the corridors. He's certain he has never heard such a sound before. It sounds like something out of a horror film and turns his blood to ice as the sound hits his ears.

He coughs as a horrible smell dances in his nostrils and on the back of his tongue. The smell of his own vomit circles around him like vultures waiting for their prey to finally die. It merges with the horrible smell coming from elsewhere and makes him want to empty his stomach once more.

There's a shuffling sound from round the corner. Sally growls more threateningly than Gregory has heard before and he wants nothing more than to run away screaming for his life.

"_Uuurrrggh…"_

He only just realises he lost his weapon somewhere near the horrible room with slaughtered children –he's not going back there. So. Much. Blood. His pokémon drops to all fours and leaps towards the threat she sees. He watches as she raises her arms to slice down on her foe-

-only for her to freeze at the last moment.

The horrible smell is back and attacks him with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. He vaguely remembers some smell like it, when he found a really horribly old, dead vulpix by the side of the road. His mind briefly touches the idea that the centre could just be filled with more rotting corpses.

Sally backtracks a few steps. She looks more frightened than her trainer has ever seen her –what could cause that? That is enough to make him nearly pass out from fear. His heart is thundering in his chest, in his fingertips, in his cheeks and his ears.

_Thump, thump, thump. _

It's all he can hear. The cacophony of his heartbeat deafens him to anything else. The smell is choking him and he's certain the sounds of groaning are getting closer.

He takes a breath, chokes on the foul smell –definitely something dead - and decides that he has to see what's frightened his pokémon so. His hands clench into his fists. He steps towards his pokémon, convinced he's prepared for what he'll see.

He sees the horror that awaits him and realises _nothing _could have ever prepared him for such a sight.

The man – is it a man? – is completely missing an eye socket. His jaw is hanging from his face –is that what the back of the throat looks like?- and his cheeks are torn totally from the bone. Little bits of sinew and flesh dangle, swinging slightly with every step he takes. His clothes are torn with teeth marks, claw marks and who-knows what else.

He's staring at a _corpse._

One of the worst things is that not all of the wounds have been caused by pokémon.

"I'm dreaming," Gregory whispers as he steps back quickly. The corpse stumbles forwards, its remaining eye clouded over and its arms hanging limply by its side. A dream is the only thing that can explain why something can walk with its intestines wrapped around its hips.

It has to be a dream. Why else can there be bone sticking out of the man at random places? Some horrible nightmare is the only thing that makes the purple tinge of the man's skin seem so realistic.

"_Uuurrrghh…"_

Only in dreams can dead people moan.

The corpse's arms slowly rise as another moan escapes its mouth. Gregory leaps back, grabs hold of his pokémon –she's shaking too!- and feels his entire body shake as he more smells than sees the rotting flesh in the corpse's mouth.

It takes until the dead man's arms are trying to scratch at his face for Gregory to snap out of his stupor. He screams, punches the thing in the head and watches as it topples over backwards. He winces and shakes his stinging hand, checks to make sure he hasn't broken it or gotten injured before he checks the man.

He's not breathing.

Gregory sighs, doubles over and just stares at the man. He decides that he's been hallucinating. All the scares, the paranoia and the death have made him think that dead things are stalking the world and eating the living.

Suddenly the corpse snatches Gregory's foot.

He shrieks and stamps down on the dead man's mouth. It shatters with a horrible _crunch_ and splinters right along the man's face. The corpse's arms are still moving, ever as it tries to lumber back to his feet.

Something snaps in Gregory's mind.

"The head!" he hisses towards his pokémon. "Get the head!"

Seeing her trainer deal with the thing seems to have snapped Sally out of her stupor. She gives the tiniest of nods and spits out a violent stream out seeds that shatter the tiles on the floor. A number pierce the man's skull and shatter it into pieces, spraying the floor beneath it with dead, coagulated blood. The sceptile closes its mouth, takes a step closer and sniffs the corpse, before leaping back once more, hissing wildly at the creature.

"This can't be happening," Gregory whispers as he clutches at his head. "He's dead. He shouldn't be moving. He shouldn't be trying to _eat _us! This is something out of a damned horror film!"

He's shouting now and doesn't realise it. His pokémon hisses at him, glares around the pokémon centre and finally leaps at her trainer, pressing a clawed paw over his mouth. He glares at the pokémon, not understanding why she's doing such a thing until he hears the distant shuffles.

There's more of them!

He thinks as quickly as he can. They were walking for less than a minute to reach this corridor. His feet are moving before his brain even knows what he's doing. Sally is leaping alongside him, ready and willing to attack anything that leaps out at them now.

He's certain that they're home free once they reach the reception area…

Then he sees that a crowd has gathered.

…a crowd of more _dead_ things.

_What. The. Fuck?_

He doesn't have time to try and figure these things out. The things are only just noticing him as he flings a poké ball from his belt. It explodes into a giant triceratops with steel-coloured skin and azure eyes hidden underneath a metallic faceplate.

The aggron glances around the room, roars in protest at the hideous smell and begins to attack the creatures that try to break her tough skin with their weak fingernails and teeth.

"Agnes!" Gregory screams at the creature. "Barge down the doors!"

His pokémon gives another might roar. Her tail flings a host of people into the nearby walls even as Gregory panics and hides behind his sceptile. He glances around for a weapon and finds nothing he could ever use. Upturned chairs and tables might be able to do some damage, but he knows he'd never be able to lift them and keep hitting the dead with them.

His sceptile hisses and slices at everything that stumbles too close to them. Gregory is full of thanks that she's that protective of him. He can't believe what's going on and still thinks that it's all some strange hallucination. He's heard that mismagius are meant to live around Mount Silver –not that he's ever seen one - and he tells himself that maybe one's put him to sleep and is slowly draining his life.

The doors give way with an almighty sound as the aggron charges straight through them. Sunlight glares into the room and breaks Gregory's train of thought for just a moment.

It's almost enough time for the things to leap up him.

His aggron has seen the danger. She spins around and breathes a stream of flames that bake the corpses alive. Gregory chokes on the smell of burning, dead flesh and doubles over, his body retching and his stomach empty.

The world shifts underneath him and the smell is replaced by trees and faint sweat. He knows instantly the smell of his sceptile. She cradles him in her arms, spits another stream of seeds at the things and leaps over them all towards the exit. She lands, tucks herself into a roll and passes underneath another stream of flames the aggron uses to barbeque its foes.

Scraps and pains dig into Gregory's knees and elbows. He fights the pain, forces himself upright and glances back towards the pokémon centre. The things are still in there, still lumbering slowly towards him. One or two are on fire, still groaning even as they continue to walk.

His panic is threatening to knock him out. He takes a breath and tells himself he's dealt with worth. He's fought harsh battles before – he's no stranger to a life-or-death situation. He recalls a scenario years ago, when his sceptile was still but a treecko. They'd gotten lost somewhere near Slateport in Hoenn and found themselves trapped by a group of vileplume. The beasts didn't seem to appreciate the two intruders during their mating season.

They survived that by quick thinking and sheer force of will.

Gregory tells himself they can do the same here.

They can't burn the centre down. The explosion will hit them, he knows. They might be unlucky and send a few of the creatures flying towards him. That they can walk is bad enough; he doesn't want to teach them how to fly! He can see the bite marks, the rips of flesh over the people and knows that they're all from teeth. He isn't sure if they're from humans, but given the way the creatures are lumbering towards him, he knows not to take chances.

"Bury it," he says quickly. He slaps his aggron on the side and points towards the centre. "Cause an earthquake, bury the entire thing. Sally, pick off the stragglers."

Agnes roars a challenge and picks herself up onto her hind legs. The creature towers over her companions and makes Gregory's heart stop for just a second. Even with the amount of time he's known her, seeing her at full height and angry still scares him.

He feels something grab him around his ribs. His aggron slams down onto the ground with her massive bulk and shatters the very earth beneath them. The ground beneath him vanishes and Gregory feels his sceptile leap upwards and onto Agnes' back. The aggron shifts with the sudden weight and adjusts herself, digs her claws into the ground and waits for the tremors to subside.

Cracks shoot up the centre's walls and the roof begins to collapse. Even still the creatures are inching forwards, slowly and surely, unhindered by the building falling down around them. Pieces of masonry fall down upon them, shattering their legs, their arms or their bodies. It's still not enough to kill them. They begin to gnaw on their trapped limbs like feral animals trying to free themselves.

Sally is already picking off stragglers. It's amazing the way that she throws projectile attacks at them. Their brittle, broken – _dead!_ – bones shatter under every impact.

It's still not enough!

Gregory drops down and wraps his arms around Agnes' neck. "Blast them!" he screams at them both.

His pokémon understand instantly. They shout twin cries as amazing orange energy forms in their mouths. The heat threatens to burn Gregory's arms to cinders and he winces at the constant pain. He remembers teaching them both this skill years ago. He remembers seeing the burnt, twisted remains of the trees and everything else they'd used as target practice.

If the attacks don't obliterate their enemies, he's certain nothing will be able to.

Heat stings the air. Ethereal, unknown energies lift all the hairs on the back of his neck and spine. Everything around him becomes quiet – the calm before the storm.

Then there's a _deafening_ explosion.

His ears ring like he's stood underneath a church bell. He opens his eyes – when did he shut them? – and stares at the damage before them.

There's nothing left of the pokémon centre.

A smoking crater lies where the building once did. Little charred chunks of flesh rain down from the sky. Burnt blood splatters on them from the heavens.

Gregory knows he would have found it funny, if it wasn't so damn _terrifying!_

He assesses the damage and blows a little breath of relief. Sally sinks and leans down on Agnes' back, completely exhausted. His aggron's legs are shaking under the strain of keeping her and her passengers aloft.

"Fuck," he whispers. It's the only word able to assess the entire situation. They've _vaporised_ the pokémon centre and everything that was still in it! If everything was different, Gregory knows he would be facing life imprisonment. His pokémon would be taken off him and destroyed.

It takes him a little while to realise that things aren't normal.

He doesn't know what to do now. If things are so bad in this little town he wonders what the rest of the world is like.

_His parents!_

The thought strikes him dumb. He falls off his pokémon in shock and barely registers their looks of concern. He searches his pockets frantically and comes up with his phone, battered and beaten but still somehow alive.

There's no signal.

The one realisation is like a punch in the gut. He doesn't know what the hell's going on, what he's supposed to do or even if his parents are safe. There's no one around to even explain what's going on.

A horrible thought strikes him; _what if there were people in the pokémon centre?_

His sceptile is helping him to his feet. He's unable to think or process anything at the thought. He can't have killed anyone! There wasn't anyone in the centre – what if there was? He didn't see anyone – _he didn't search everywhere_ – when he was in there.

He tells himself he's done no harm. If there was anyone in there, they were probably just food.

His mind returns enough for him to thank his pokémon. He groans and rubs his eyes. It seems so strange that it was only a few hours ago he was having a relatively peaceful night's sleep before he left the caves and returned to the outside world.

It's all so unreal. It's like he's survived the apocalypse! He knows that Mount Silver is rather shut off from the world, but it can't be outside of judgement day!

Agnes roars and startles him from his thoughts. His hands clench into fists before he realises it and he glances at his pokémon. She growls in the direction of the town; her dark eyes focusing on one point alone.

Gregory wonders what the hell's going on.

Then he hears the sounds.

_Screaming!_

_People are alive in there!_

He needs to go save them – can he? – before something bad happens. He wouldn't put anyone through his situation – being stuck alone in a hellhole like their current situation.

Gunfire rips through the air. He jumps and wonders just how deep he actually got into the caves to miss everything that was ever happening.

There's a little sound under the gunfire. A little familiar sound that his body tells him he should run from.

He learnt long ago to trust his instincts.

He recalls Agnes hastily and starts running along the remains of a dirt road. Sally is lumbering along beside him, her claws and blades ready. She's like a different pokémon now – her previous falter before seems to have belonged to a foreign creature. Blood lines her blades and he sees the disgust on her face – she wants to clean it off but knows she can't groom herself normally.

It's another weird little adjustment Gregory tells himself they'll have to get used to.

The sound seems like it's getting louder.

He glances at his pokémon, shares a silent thought with her.

_Please let it be pokémon._

His pokémon may not be psychic but they've known each other for eleven years. They can understand what the other means with just a glance. She gives him a look back which chills his spine.

_It isn't._

His lungs are burning in his chest. He's certain he can taste a little blood in his throat. There's phlegm beginning to block his airways.

He tells himself that he'll rest once they're safe.

Then he sees more of the things.

His feet stop moving by themselves. It's only by some miracle that he manages not to topple over. There's maybe five of them, all dragging themselves towards the remains of the town. He realises that they heard the sound of the explosion.

They're drawn to sound.

It's something he knows he needs to know.

He just needs to survive long enough to use it.

"Sally," he starts uncertainly. His pokémon is stood in a battle stance, ready, waiting. She might be waiting for an order, but he knows as soon as they're close she'll use her own wits.

He opens his mouth to speak, but he's cut off by another sound.

His brain is working slowly. He only realises what it is as his pokémon snatches him and throws them both to the side of the road.

He sees quite possible the most demonic-looking Landrover he's ever seen tear down the stream and mow down at least three of the things. They fly over the top of the vehicle and all land heavily on the road behind it. Their bodies are twisted, broken and look too damaged to be used again.

Another one of the creatures got ripped in two by something stuck on the side of the vehicle. Gregory squints at the moving car and manages to work out exactly what it is.

_You've got to be kidding._

Chainsaws!

The madman driving has attached a _chainsaw_ to the side of the damn thing! It's still whirring, splattering blood and flesh everywhere as the vehicle spins around to a stop and revs its motor.

The final creature has gotten away uninjured.

Gregory can smell it even from a distance. It _reeks_! It looks dead – it can't be – and still walks towards him.

The doors on the car open.

He sees two figures leap out of the car. They're both wearing coveralls and welder's masks. One's taller than the other and has a shotgun in their hands. They pump it and blast the severed thing in two. It explodes in a mess of flesh, blood, bone and gravel from the floor below it.

The other is racing towards the final thing. He sees a tire iron in the person's hands. The thing turns around and receives it full in the face. It falls down groaning. The figure doesn't stop hitting it.

Whoever it is seems pissed at whatever the thing is.

Or maybe whoever it was.

There's nothing but fleshy squelches breaking the silence as the person continues bashing the thing's brains in. They only stop when the other places a hand on their shoulder.

They both move from the thing and stare at Gregory. He scuttles backwards on the floor, fearing them both. They've just killed the things – things he's killed himself – without even flinching! Just who are they?

Just how long has this been happening for?

The one with the shotgun raises his mask. His face is old and wrinkled, a wispy-white beard graces his face and he seems to be in need of a wash.

The stranger offers Gregory a quick-once over.

"You or your pokémon get bit?" he asks. His shotgun is pointed at them both. It confirms what Gregory had been arguing with himself about; bites are what spread it!

Sally hisses at the strange man. Gregory places a hand on her arm and shakes his head. "We-no," he says quickly. His voice is scratchy and shaking. It's a bad first impression, he decides. Were things normal, they probably would think him a slurring drunkard.

He swallows in an attempt to moisten his throat. "What-what the hell's going on here?"

The old man pulls his gun away and holds it loosely in a hand. His free hand reaches up to scratch at his beard. "It's a long answer."

The other person lifts their mask up. Gregory is shocked to see it's a woman – she's rather slim underneath the mask and her face is splotched in dirt and grease. Her eyelids have a slight pinch to them and dark brown eyes stare back at him.

She offers him a hand up. "They're zombies. They bite you, you're dead."

The old man coughs into his hand. "Obviously not that long an answer," he mutters to himself.

The information is the final straw for Gregory. "'Zombies'?" He can't believe it. It's something out of fiction. Yet it's stared him in the face and nearly tried to eat him countless times within the past twenty damn _minutes!_

"R-right," he says as the world spins around him. "Excuse me while I pass out."

_Great first impression_ he thinks to himself. Then he whites out and he's gone.


	4. Surviving

_Case File #1101, Record Number 07931d4m009_

_Subject responds to ghosts and darkness. Unable to confirm meaning of findings._

_Insect buzzing seems to anger specimen. Results show that upon infiltration of a host, specimen vulnerable only to otherwise lethal assaults. Still-living hosts appear to continue possession after death, coming back and requiring standard severing of cerebral cortex._

_This is no simple virus._

* * *

_**Pokémon**_

_**Plague**_

_Surviving_

* * *

Schools always seem like they hold the end of the world.

This time, they actually do.

She hides under the desk, whispers reassurances to herself and wonders if she'll ever get out.

The sounds are getting distant – does it mean they're gone? – but she can still smell what they left. She pulls her knees into her chest and breathes as slowly as she can. The smell of blood is all around her. Blood and gore coat her body, painting her with a gruesome smell of death.

She shouldn't have wandered into a school. Maybe that was true. But she thought it would be safe! It has big walls, loads of rooms and science labs full of chemicals to fight with! The gym held more improvised weapons than she'd ever seen. It even seems like everyone else had the exact same idea as her!

Until they got eaten, at least.

Gwen Jones cuddles herself and prays to whatever will hear her that she can make it out alive. She doesn't want to die – much less so at fifteen! There's still so much more that she wants to do! She wants to win a championship! She wants to see her mum and dad give birth to her new baby sister!

She wants the world to be back to normal.

Three weeks. Three weeks have passed since everything changed. It happened slowly – she remembers it all. Little news reports. People claiming certain places have injured people and weird infections.

Then the towns started to get shut off. After that, she heard that the whole of Johto was infected. The last report she heard was that it was the same all across the world.

She knows exactly why she's in the former high school in Ecruteak. Her friend started his journey about three weeks ago. She still hasn't heard from him. Nothing, not even a letter or a text message!

… not that it would matter now anyway. None of the phones seem to work. Sure they can still be charged, but it's worthless without the signal to call people.

Her mind wanders to her parents. Her little brother, who's meant to start his own trainer journey in a month. And her mum's pregnant again.

Is she still alive to give birth though?

She tries her best to avoid the thoughts. She won't say anything until she finds them. Sure, maybe it's a long trip back to Saffron. It's going to be even longer in the current state of the world. But she's still hoping.

She fingers a poké ball attached to her belt. She wants nothing more than to release her pokémon with her. But she knows how the sound attracts the things. If she lets anything out, she's going to make sure it's when she can move and escape in one fluid motion.

It's taken her an hour so far. An hour to cross the space of three classrooms. It's taken an hour for her to move carefully enough to stay alive.

No bites, no scratches and nothing broken. She considers that she's doing well, given the circumstances. She's seen so many people be killed by those things that stalk her and everyone else that still breathes. She used to travel in a group of five. Now there's just her. She used to have five pokémon by her side. Now she's lucky if she can say there's three of them.

She takes a breath and listens a little bit more. The shuffling is moving away once more. She'll be able to move again soon.

She's one classroom away from the main exit.

It'll probably take her another hour to get to the doors. Then maybe all of five seconds to run out of the doors and find a way out of the place.

She knows she can't handle another hour to escape. She fears being eaten as soon as she's free of the school.

She has one pokémon that can lead the charge. He'll be able to scatter the things. They probably won't be able to damage him either.

It's her that she worries about. Her pokémon that are left are all resistant to the attacks, it seems. It's almost like the pokémon that have skin as tough as rocks or steel are resistant to everything. She's seen one or two taken down, but it takes a long time.

She takes a deep breath and moves closer to the door. The shuffling sounds are further away. She flinches as she hears someone scream in the far distance. She wants to help them, but knows she can't. She's seen people abandon children in the streets to save their own skin. She knows that no one's going to bother saving her.

She's not going to die. She tells herself that and holds onto the one simple thought. It fills her with a bit more confidence. She finds her weapon laying on the floor, dropped and forgotten when she ran into the room. The wrench is stained with blood and little bits of flesh Gwen tries not to remember attacking. She turns it over in her hands, feels it weight and tries to reassure herself that it's all for the best.

Then she flings open the door and races for the next room.

Her heart thumps in her chest as fear sinks into her. The moans aren't anywhere near, but her feet slapping on the floor are loud enough to draw anything nearby. She reaches the door and throws herself into it, wrench brandished and ready to brain any dead creature that wants to eat her.

There's nothing.

She breathes a sigh of relief.

She moves quickly, finds a desk and pushes it against the door. The wood screeches as it moves. The sound hurts her ears and fills her with terror. The more sound she makes, the faster the things will come. Once she's certain it's safe in the room, she moves around, poking everything with her weapon.

Nothing's alive. Nothing's pretending to be dead either.

The remains of a teacher sit in his chair. He stares out at the empty classroom with an equally empty stare. Little flies buzz around him, crawl in and over his mouth and in his unseeing eyeballs. Gwen turns away quickly as bile rises in her throat. She doesn't need to see anything like that.

But it's become so common.

She moves to the windows and lifts up one of the blinds. Her heart stops at the sight outside. The students, some parents and maybe a few teachers. They're either on the floor, dead, or shambling around, still as dead.

Her eyes run over each of the fallen corpses in the playground. She knows for a fact that she didn't cause any of them. Someone else has been here. She's not sure whether that's a good thing or not. They could be good people, looking for survivors and helping out. Equally, they could just be assholes that are abusing the end of the world for kicks.

A face slams against the window.

She screams and leaps away, her heart thundering in her chest. The _thing_ smears its face on the window. It leaves behind a sickly trail of green-red gunk and moans incoherently. It raises a fist and pounds on the window, moaning ever more with the lack of success.

Gwen curses to herself and looks around the room once more. Nothing's going to get in from the corridors anytime soon. It makes her feel better. But things can come in through the windows. She knows if that happens, she's dead. She won't be able to climb out of the windows and escape easily.

She only has the one real chance to escape. She considers running back through the corridors. The desk she's put in front of the door might be her enemy though. If she has to waste time moving that, the things could get in.

She eyes the far wall of the classroom and considers her option. It looks like it's made of bricks and mortar. Sturdy enough, but not built to withstand a charging pokémon.

She makes her decision then and there. She fingers the goggles hanging around her neck and quickly slips them over her eyes. She finds the poké ball she wants and throws in forwards, scattering tables and chairs with the explosion. It forms the familiar sight of her grey, rock-plated rhino pokémon. It throws back its head in a roar and scuffs the floor with its forepaws, tensing and preparing to charge.

She nods silently at it and climbs atop the saddle on its back. It gives a small grunt as she taps it on the side with her feet, acknowledges the command and tenses. It roars and creates a sandstorm within the classroom. Sand begins to fly around everywhere, winds build at such speeds that they knock over the already demolished desk. Gwen taps her rhyhorn behind its armoured head twice then makes herself as small as possible.

She feels her pokémon roar, the sound vibrates through her legs and makes her teeth chatter. She grips ever tighter to her pokémon, telling herself her idea will work. Her pokémon snorts and begins to charge.

Suddenly, she's not so sure anymore.

She doesn't have time to complain as her pokémon charges into the brick wall. There's an almighty explosion and hard pieces of masonry rain down upon her. Plaster and brick dust race into her nose and her mouth, choking her even as she reaches fresh air.

The sandstorm explodes out of the classroom behind them. It pushes her rhyhorn forwards, adding momentum to its charge. She hears the winds whip at the things around her. She sees them fly off their feet and hit the ground hard. Some of them are crushed by her charging pokémon. The others are gored or trampled. She raises her weapon and smacks anything that comes too close.

Everything's blurring around her. She sees the fences all become one long streak of black. The things are ever changing, but in a set pattern. They get further away, then one appears near her. She smacks it and it falls behind, disappearing in the distance as another takes it place.

She taps her rhyhorn on the side of the head. It gives the barest of nods before fire explodes out of its mouth. Everything in front of her is suddenly burning and moaning at once. The smell slaps the back of her throat and makes her gag again. She breaths as slowly as she can with adrenaline assaulting her.

She taps the left of her pokémon's head. It roars again, horn crackling with electricity. There's a deafening thunderclap as lightning suddenly shoots out of its horn and explodes on the ground before them. It sends the things flying in every direction. Gwen doesn't bother looking to see if they're burnt or what. She pats her pokémon on the head and silently gestures for it to keep moving.

It takes no time for them to clear what remains of the derelict school.

Even so, Gwen's heart is rather heavy.

It's another one of her leads down. She needs to find out what happens to her friend. She can't leave Johto without finding out. She knows she'll never be able to forgive herself if she just ran to Saffron and found out later he was just dying in a ditch, when she could have saved him.

She reaches up and pulls the goggles from her face. A few tears run down her dusty cheeks and carve a salty path to her chin. She's loyal to a fault. She knows that.

And right now, it's one of the only reasons she sees in staying alive.

* * *

"Don't put him on the back seats."

Naoko Stephens sighs to herself as their latest survivor's pokémon tries to look after its unconscious master. A little bit of her smiles at the sight of a pokémon caring so much for its trainer. It _is_ heart-warming. The only problem is that she doesn't want him messing up her car. The backseats hold the spare ammo and a few weapons. It won't be any good in a fight if they have to reach around an unconscious goon and his protective pokémon for a chance of staying alive.

The giant lizard-dragon-monster-thing hisses at her. She throws it a glare and points to the car. "Let me move the stuff around, or you'll both be travelling in the boot."

It gives her a sharp look. She matches it with a fanged grin. The pokémon – she thinks it's a sceptile – pulls back reluctantly and watches over its unconscious trainer.

Naoko hums a little to herself as she begins to clean the backseats. Most passengers she has don't take up more than one seat – though most of her passengers don't pass out before getting in the car. Nor do they usually include giant lizards with leafy tails.

She roots through the car and stops short as her fingertips brush against something metal. Her hands move around the toy slowly, savouring the feel of it. She recognises it so well, remembers the day she first bought it – cloudy, no rain and with that amazing sounding engine attached to the people wagon – and finds her heart just a little heavy.

She pockets the small toy car with expert subtlety. A few boxes of ammo go into the already over packed glove compartment. Most of the stuff gets shoved to the side. Finally there's one seat clear and she looks back at the massive pokémon.

"There," she says and points to the seat. "You're not going to let us recall you, so you're going to have to sit there with your trainer in your lap. It's the only solution we've got."

She realises how stupid it is that she's talking to a pokémon that could very well not understand her. She voices such opinions, to the pokémon itself. It raises an eyebrow – do those things even have them? – and grunts a small noise back to her. She wonders just what it means before it slides gently into the car seat and places its trainer on its lap.

"Put your seatbelt on," she says, almost like she's speaking to a child. The sceptile looks at her as if she's mad – she's becoming certain she is – and grunts a small noise again. Naoko sighs and points to the metal buckle behind the creature. "Pull that and place it into the little black box on your left. If you don't understand I'll do it for you, but if you go for me I'm going to punch you in the face."

It gives her an unimpressed look. She huffs at it and slams the door shut. It seems a little uncomfortable sitting in the back there, unable to fight, but she knows the pokémon understands it's to help its trainer.

Naoko sighs as she looks around the remains of yet another town – what was its name? – and the zombies that probably killed everything in there. Dirty, dead fuckers that they are. She's seen people that tell everyone else that the zombies are still people and don't deserve to be shot in the face whenever you see them. She might not know much, but she's certain that anything that tries to _eat_ you isn't going to become your friend overnight – pokémon notwithstanding. Much less so something that by all natural definitions happens to be dead.

She sees the remains of one of the things near her car. She spits at its unmoving head and grabs her tire iron from the road. She turns it up in the sun, laments that her favourite iron is now covered in zombie goo and wonders just whether or not it will be clean enough to use for its main purpose again.

She rolls her eyes as a little whistle drifts towards her. He holds his welder's mask in a hand and looks like he's trying to spin his shotgun one handed as he returns to the car.

She opens her door, jumps onto a step and towers over her vehicle to glare down at him. "So how comes every time there's heavy lifting involved, you always suddenly need to piss?"

He chuckles, a raspy sound that she's become happily accustomed to lately. "I'm old dear girl. Too much lifting is going to leave me with a hernia."

"You're lazy," she shoots back. "And _I'll_ give you much worse than a hernia if you keep saddling me with the lifting."

"Whatever." He laughs and grabs the handle to the passenger side door. "We both know that if anything goes in your car, you sure as hell don't let anyone touch anything already inside."

"That's because you all make a mess of my babies." She shakes her head and swings fully into her seat. The sceptile behind her hisses as she starts up the car and she turns to give it a flat look. "If you throw up, aim at the window. Or on your trainer. It might wake him up."

Smokey turns and looks at the sight behind him. "Tell me I'm seeing what I'm actually seeing. A trainer sitting in his pokémon's _lap_."

Naoko shrugs as she shifts the car into gear. "There wasn't much space in the back. It was that or the boot. Besides, as if he'll be worried about his dignity. He just fainted after seeing a few zombies get killed."

Smokey sighs and buries his face in his hands. "I really wish you'd stop calling them 'zombies', Naoko."

She laughs at him. "What else am I going to call them? They're dead and _eat people_. They're also able to walk – well, shuffle really. Give me a better name and I'll use it."

He blows a breath at her. "I'll get back to you on that. And gods above woman! Watch the road when you're driving! You almost hit that thing back there?"

She looks back to the road and checks her wing mirror quickly. "Looks already dead to me," she says with a shrug. She catches movement out of the corner of her eye and smacks her passenger's moving arms. "And I've already told you this, Smokey. You dare to light a cigarette in my car and I'll feed you to the zombies."

He laughs sheepishly back at her. "Come on, killing those buggers is tiring on these old bones. You're saying I don't deserve a reward?"

"No, I'm saying I don't want you smoking near my-" She catches herself and falls silent instantly, her heart sunk and soul crushed.

"Near your what?" Smokey asks her.

She sighs and shakes her head. "Near my car," she says, her voice dead. "This baby cost a lot of my time and effort. You're lucky I let you lot spoil her with chainsaws."

He laughs and leans on his closed window. "As I remember it, _you_ insisted on equipping a car with them. And you're the one that wired up the car so that we can use them."

"I'm just a motoring genius," she says with a smirk. Finally she sighs and waves her hand at him. "Fine, you can have _one_. But you're cleaning my car until the smoke smell's gone."

It's too dangerous to open the windows. They all know this already. The zombies have the unruly habit of being able to sneak through windows – can it be called sneaking when they crash through? – and generally cause all sorts of mayhem. She remembers driving before everything went bad and having random fliers or little insect pokémon deciding to drop in through her sunroof. Now days, if any of those happen to be dead, the car pretty much becomes a moving coffin.

"Thanks," Smokey says as he sparks up.

She rolls her eyes and throws a half-hearted glare at him. "You're lucky I like you. Anyone else would be _eating_ that damn thing right now."

He laughs. "I don't doubt it. Besides, calling them zombies is an insult. I remember the old zombie films when they came out. Pokémon never usually turned. And plus, these things are a hell of a lot smarter than those films. Did you see what they'd done in that damn town? They'd let the walkers go in first. I don't think that's a sign of stupid undead cannibals."

"I know," Naoko says heavily. "I'm trying not to think about that. They're dead, they're stupid. That's easy to deal with. But what we've seen lately…" She shakes her head and speeds just a little bit. "I don't like it, Smokey. They've only been around for three weeks. I might not have done well in school, but I'm sure as hell something like this shouldn't happen so quickly."

He laughs again and leans back in his chair. "This shouldn't be happening at all, girly. It defies all the natural laws."

She shrugs. "Well, you're a biologist. Biologise why this is happening."

"'Biologise'?" he echoes, face flat. Finally he snorts and turns to face the window. "I'm honestly clueless as to how this is happening. Some bacteria can breed so rapidly that they can evolve within weeks. But no bacteria can control a host after the host's death. There's a few that can do it while the host is still alive, but all the natural laws say that when something's dead, it just rots and remains dead."

"They still are," Naoko says. "Only problem is they're walking and still eating. Face it; you biologists just aren't smart enough. Otherwise you'd have a reason for this and more importantly, a cure."

Smokey chuckles and cracks open the window a little. He tosses the remains of his cigarette out before closing the window once again and offering Naoko a smile. "Did I ever tell you how _wonderful_ this bluntness of yours is?"

She returns his smile. "I just say it how it is. You've never been able to argue what I say though. Even if you do try to tell me I'm wrong by calling them zombies." She checks the sceptile behind her quickly, makes sure that it's still there and okay before pulling into the final stretch of road. She finds it strange how the once non-descript clearing in the woods has now become so familiar to her that she can identify it without thinking. She swings the car around a full one-eighty, hears both her conscious passengers grunt in protest and smiles to herself. Serves them right for cramping and stinking up her car.

She unbuckles herself, swivels round in her chair and points to the sceptile's seatbelt. It gives a small nod before she unbuckles it and takes a look at the trainer. His hair is brown, bushy and looks in desperate need of a trim. His eyebrows are big, brown and bushy. Naoko smiles to herself, imagines him as a hoothoot and tries to fight the laughter that comes with it. He wears the staple practical body warmer, long sleeve jacket and cargo pants that all trainers seem to. She considers his face, thinks that she's seen it somewhere before – passing trainer perhaps? – but ignores the train of thought.

"Stay behind me," she tells the pokémon. "I'll open your door for you, then we'll go into the camp. Someone will probably want to check to make sure your trainer's okay, you'll be able to trust them."

She sees the pokémon nod, but recognises the level of distrust in its eyes. She can't blame it – she's still quite surprised it trusts them enough to have even gotten in the car with them. Apparently saving someone from hungry zombies earns a pokémon's trust.

"I'll let everyone know we're back," Smokey tells her. "They'll be pissed we brought back no food and more mouths to feed."

She rolls her eyes back at him. "You know as much as I do that's not true. And besides, he looks like a strong trainer. Granted, one that fainted and is still unconscious, but strong nonetheless. He'll be able to help collect food." Smokey nods and lets her know she's right. She smiles back at him before she quickly grabs a cloth and throws it at his head. "Make sure my car smells normal before sunset, alright? Or I'm going to spike your food."

He grabs the cloth before it hits the ground and shakes his head. "Slave driver," he tells her. "You'll work these old bones to death!"

Naoko grunts in amusement at him. Once he's rounded a corner of trees she opens the door of her car for the sceptile. It slides out gracefully, trainer carried bridal style in its hands. It sniffs the air, squints at the distance and growls slightly before it gives her a small nod.

She decides quickly that the trainer needs to wake up. If only because it'll make understanding his pokémon just that bit easier. Having strong pokémon on their side will be good too – that is, if they stay and help them – considering that they're running low on actual weapons.

"Follow me," she says to the pokémon with a quick wave. She trudges on ahead, follows the route by memory alone. She turns at the first tree she sees, follows a hidden path through the bushes and smells the distinct smell of grilled remoraid as they approach the camp.

She never would have thought living outdoors would mesh so well with her. She never really wanted to be a travelling trainer – why would anyone want to escape the hustle and bustle of city life – and was perfectly content before everything went to pieces. It's strange that she enjoys her life so much now, but she tells herself it's probably for the best. Otherwise she'd probably have been dead meat by now.

She makes her way into the camp, aware of the large pokémon behind her. Once she reaches the first step into camp, she sees a familiar pokémon. It seems to be wearing a large, layered black dress and three large black spikes stick out of either side of its purple face. A number of little white, dirty bows hang from its body and another pulls back what seems to be hair atop its head.

"Hitomi!" Naoko yells at the pokémon. It perks up at its name, blue eyes widen as it sees the woman approach and it lets out a little, happy hum.

"Told you I'd be back," Naoko says as she hugs the pokémon. She smiles at the gothitelle and gestures behind her. "I found these stragglers when we went to search that town. The pokémon's strong. It's trainer… well, he fainted after we killed a few zombies."

The psychic raises a fine eyebrow at the woman. _"Pray tell, how much did you damage him before he fainted?"_

Naoko laughs, unable to help herself. "I'll have you know he just freaked after seeing so many zombies. He doesn't seem to have seen them before. I swear though, if he tells us he's been passed out in a hospital for the past three weeks, somehow alive despite being on life support, I might very well kick his face off.

The sceptile hisses something in response. Hitomi cracks a small smile and looks back to her trainer. _"The sceptile says she would like to see you try."_

Naoko shrugs and glances at the large lizard. "I'll have you know I've fought enough zombies to know how to kick a head off a body. Might be a bit easier when they're dead, but hey, it works. Anyway, anything happened while I was gone, 'Tomi?"

The gothitelle shakes its head. _"Today's been very mundane. I think there was an argument about one of the couples being too loud at night. I don't know, I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to them."_

"Oh," Naoko says, face dropping. "_Those_ people. Finally someone says something – they've been distracting me every time I've gone to say something. I don't think they like me saying things sometimes. Oh well." She shrugs and glances further into the camp. "Up to much? Fancy trying to find Mavis?"

"_She's near her tent."_

"You're no fun at all," Naoko accuses of her pokémon. "Fine, spoil my only entertainment for the day. You coming or not?"

The gothitelle shakes her head. _"I'm to help train some of the weaker pokémon, or so I've been told. I'm fairly certain some of them would only be useful as fodder, in case the things find us."_

"Good luck," Naoko says with a smile. She tells her pokémon to be back in time for sunset before she starts to lead the sceptile further into the camp. "I've had Hitomi since I was about ten," she says to the pokémon, unsure why she's explaining such a thing. "Dad said it was just in case I decided I ever wanted to be a trainer. Truth be told, I always found cars more interesting." She glances back and sees the sceptile still carrying its trainer, apparently concerned only with his safety. She sighs to herself and wonders just why every pokémon isn't able to communicate. It still seems weird that they can't – though owning a psychic for almost half her life may have tainted her views.

She stoops below a makeshift washing line covered in still-drying clothes. Hidden behind is a large red tent with a number of little spices growing outside.

"Mavis?" Naoko shouts into the tent flap. She smiles as the woman appears from within – short blonde hair, bright green eyes and a few inches taller than Naoko herself. She makes a silent wish to herself that when she's forty she can keep away the age as well as Mavis seems to – though a little part of her tells her she should focus her wishes on _reaching _forty.

"Naoko!" Mavis grins and embraces her quickly. "It's good to see that you're back unharmed. Smokey came by earlier, said you'd have someone for me to look at?" She tilts her head and stares past her, almost like she sees the sceptile for the first time.

"Yeah." Naoko nods and moves aside, gesturing for the sceptile to walk forwards. "We found these two just outside the town. No bites or scratches, but he passed out just after we saved him from a couple of zombies."

Mavis heaves a sigh. "I really wish you'd stop calling them that, dear."

Naoko rolls her eyes, if only by habit. "What else can we call them?" She feels it's like the thousandth time she's said such a thing. She honestly wouldn't be surprised if it _was_. "Anyway, he doesn't seem to be hurt, but like you can see, his sceptile's looking after him pretty protectively, so we figured he might need checking over."

Mavis nods as she approaches him. She looks up to the sceptile and gestures her question for approach. Somewhat reluctantly the sceptile agrees and follows her to lay the trainer down on a bed within the tent.

"It looks like shock," Mavis says after a quick examination. "I think he could be a bit underfed, but that's pretty normal among travelling trainers. Or _was_ normal, at least." She dusts her hands against each other and smiles up at the sceptile. "He's going to be fine. Just let him rest for a little bit and he should be awake sometime soon."

The sceptile grunts and lumbers down next to her trainer. Naoko watches it with a small smile and sighs to herself. "Nice to see that some pokémon and people still look out for each other. Some of those houses in that town Mavis…" She shakes her head and stares up at the sky. "It looked like people had just thrown each other to the lions, all to escape. We couldn't find any food left either. It looked like it had been cleared out a while ago."

Mavis glances back at the unconscious trainer. "Any idea who he is? Maybe what he was doing there?"

"Beats me. He seems to have no idea about what's going on though. Either he's a moron or he's somehow been out of the picture for three weeks."

Mavis grunts and folds her arms. "He's a trainer, correct? Or at least, he looks like one. He could have been in Mount Silver – that's close enough to the town you were in. If he's seen nothing of this, it _could_ mean that Mount Silver's free of this infection."

"For the time being, maybe," Naoko said; traces of doubt in her voice. "But we can't stay in there. If it spreads in there, we'd be trapped. And there's some pretty strong pokémon in there. I don't think most of us would be able to defeat any of them."

"Maybe not," Mavis agrees with a sigh. "Escaping this is a nice thought though. Ah well, I'll keep an eye on our mysterious trainer. Do you want me to let you know when he's awake?"

Naoko stares back at the older woman for a long moment. "Why would I be needed for that?"

Mavis smiles back at her. "You were there before he passed out. Even if it was you that scared him into unconsciousness, at least you'd be a familiar face."

"Alright then," Naoko says after a moment's thought. "I'll be in my tent if you need me."

She bids the woman a quick farewell and heads back to her tent. She smiles at everyone on her way back, removing herself from them so they don't ask her questions. They have Smokey for that, she tells herself. She finally reaches her tent and smiles as the creature inside squawks at her.

"Just me, Lance," she tells it. The pokémon pokes its head through the tent flap, its orange beak almost completely hiding its brown-feathered face. It finally quacks and flutters up at her, squawking happily and nearly dropping its weapon in the process.

"Careful," she laughs and hands it back it to the farfetch'd. "You'll lose this if you keep jumping around so much."

It quacks and nestles itself a bit closer to her chest. She sighs and strokes its feathery head as she crawls into her tent and lies down on her sleeping bag within. Lance quacks at her again before it scuttles off to play sentry again. She smiles at it as she feels around inside her pillow. She finds the photo tucked inside and slowly draws her thumb across the face it holds. Her entire being crumbles and she falls into a fit of tears with only the pillow to hide her sobs.

Because there's some things beating zombies to death just doesn't make any better.


	5. Adaptation

_Project Report, Case ETBA-0X001, Audio Report Logs.  
_

_"Sample obtained by foreign agents infiltrating Sinnoh city of Veilstone. Reports indicate that presence reacts to certain artefacts left in plain sight within city limits._

_"Sample is dangerous and must be exterminated upon identification. Use of darkness or ghostly energies recommended __to disable sample; fire to destroy._

_"Know that ..." _

(Tape plays nothing but silence).

****_"What the-?"_

(Sounds of gunfire. Screams. Destruction of localised property.)

_**"You are doomed."**_

(Unknown voice. No system match.)

(Five seconds of silence.)

(Tape finishes.)

* * *

_**Pokémon**_

_**Plague**_

_Adaptation_

* * *

Sunrise.

It's one of the many things now that Farrody finds herself thankful for. The fact that she now loves the sun rising doesn't escape her notice; she remembers the days where she would be skirting around during the night, fearing the day and the exposure it would bring. She could be seen easier in the day. More people could see her and figure out that she wasn't just your average crook or cop. She remembers those fears like a child would fear monsters under the bed.

Now the monsters are all too real and currently shambling – mostly crawling and moaning - across the earth.

She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. She grimaces at the feel; wonders when the last time she actually got to wash it was. She can feel the little hairs on her legs growing ever longer and is certain she could rival a man for her under-arm hair.

_Attractive._

She laughs a little to herself, wonders just why the hell she's thinking about personal appearance in such a time. She doubts the monsters care too much if she's wearing a new style of eyeliner or if she took the time to shave this morning. They just want feeding and they don't care what their prey looks like.

She reaches out and scratches the blue skin of the pokémon lying behind her. It resembles a large rhino, with extra spikes along its back and a long, thick tail curled around it. The pokémon snorts, opens a bloodshot eye and glances around the landscape.

"Everything's alright, Claire," Farrody says as she scratches the nidoqueen behind a large ear. "It's about time we head back to camp and see how things are faring, no?"

Her nidoqueen snorts a low, unconcerned breath. Farrody knows full well that her pokémon would rather they just rely on themselves, not letting themselves get caught up in another group. Every group they've come across so far ended with the same scenario; one person was bitten, they turned and then chowed down on everyone else.

Farrody promises herself that it's not going to happen again. She checked everyone once she found them, did away with the bitten – as much as she cares not to remember that – and checks everyone regularly. Survival is all that matters now, though it's still not enough to banish the thoughts she occasionally has. Remembering the faces of people when she told them their loved ones were going to die… the faces and screams they made when she put their loves out of their misery for them.

She shudders, holds her pokémon a little tighter and prays for an answer to it all. She remembers exactly how it started; the leaks from inside the police station – patient zero, as it were, was a rookie cop that spilt some of the very virus that she was hired to steal. Something happened with it and within a day he was deathly ill. Two days later, he was dead.

An hour after that, he was awake and chewing on his mother's face.

It's the worst case scenario that Elm mentioned to her, but she still can't believe what she's experiencing. It's something out of a film she usually ends up screaming at. The people on them always annoy her, doing such stupid things and never really focusing on their survival.

Now she's actually living it, she can understand why they would do such things.

Her little camp is near Tohjo Falls, just on the Kanjo border. She remembers running as fast as she could from Viridian as if it only happened minutes ago. She can still hear the radio announcements, cheering of places free of the infection.

Predictably, they ended up wastelands days later. One person with a bite gets in, then suddenly everyone's a little bit dead.

She still hasn't heard from her mother or her brother yet. Her stomach flips every time she thinks of them in this nightmarish situation. She's honestly uncertain what to pray for more; for them to be alive, but suffering in this hell, or for them to be dead and free of it all.

It's a thought that plays on many of her sleepless nights.

She pulls herself to her feet and leans against her nidoqueen for support. The pokémon grunts at her, stands on two thick legs and offers a shoulder for her trainer to lean on. Farrody shakes her head, tells her pokémon that she needs to remain strong and marches towards camp.

She is, after all, their makeshift leader. She knows they'll freak if they think she's under the weather and can't afford to let herself show weakness because of it. If they start to panic, they'll get careless. The get careless, they get dead.

It's already happened enough times, after all.

It takes less than a minute for her to return to camp. It's built into a little bit of the mountainside, with enough openness around for a quick escape, but little enough so that they can't be swamped by the monsters. The sounds of the waterfalls reach her ears and for a moment she considers taking a shower beneath one of them, to wash away the layers of grime she's covered in.

Then she remembers the dead things hiding in the water and reconsiders.

They've seen it enough times; the things don't need to breathe. They might need sleep – they've never seen one sleep, granted – but they know for certain they don't breathe. The things can walk on the bottom of a sea floor, slowly making their way towards more prey.

Unfortunately, they found out the hard way.

One young woman took her baby son down to the water front to bathe him in the sparsely-found fresh water. Within moments they were breakfast, lunch and dinner for the things lurking beneath.

Since then, they've been cautious about collecting water. They do it as frequently as they can, but try to prepare as much as they can beforehand.

But no method is fool proof, however.

Farrody sighs as she reaches the camp, sees the tattered tents – some more makeshift than others – and once again realises how little prepared they all were for all of this.

A little part of her wonders about her former partner in crime. She knows Liam was sent to one of Viridian's most secure prisons there was. It boasted a zero-per cent chance of someone ever escaping.

So the thought of one of the things getting in and turning doesn't do much for her hopes. Despite everything – the death threats and the sheer heartbreak he delivered to her that day – she still hopes that he's alive somewhere. It might be naivety or just idiocy, but she wants him to be alive, if only so she can confess and clear her conscience.

"It's not going to happen, is it Claire?" she whispers. Her pokémon looks down at her, shrugs and grunts an answer. Farrody laughs a little to herself, understands the answer perfectly and wonders if she's always been so easy to read. To her pokémon, she knows she has been. But that little paranoid spot in her brain that's been taking centre stage for so long bursts back into life, telling her that Liam always knew – that they all knew and they were all setting her up to fall.

It's stupid, she decides. She frowns, pushes the thoughts away and re-stakes a tent that's come slightly loose during the night. She hears noise from within, quickly tells them it's her and then moves on with her business.

She makes a count of the tents. Ten out of ten. Same as the night before. At least none of them have blown off during the night. She wants to start a headcount, but knows people need her sleep. Paranoia works well for her, keeps her alive, but only serves to piss other people off. Really, she should just blow off their anger and do so regardless, but she understands their need to sleep.

It's the only time that they're not constantly afraid of the things showing up.

Even now she feels her stomach bubble with uncertainty. There's at least three other people on watch, round the camp, with pokémon to boot. She knows how lucky she is, to have found a bunch of people that actually have trained pokémon. In the last camp, she was the only one that not only had pokémon, but knew how to train them.

They lasted all of two minutes when they were attacked.

She made it out by the skin of her teeth, saved only one man who then decided to blow his brains out later on because he couldn't live without his wife.

A little part of Farrody wishes that he'd just stayed alive, if only so that she could have thrown him to the things if she ever got into trouble. She squashes down the thought as quickly as she can. She knows in her past life she was torn between law-upholder and breaker. Now the end of the world's come, she finds her decision was made almost instantly; she signed up to protect and serve and she'll continue doing so, even if there's only one person left to protect.

"Hey."

She knows who it is without even having to think. Thomas. She doesn't know his last name and to be honest, doesn't care to. He won't give it up anyway. All she knows is that his entire family turned and he had to shoot them all.

Not exactly the best sixteenth birthday present someone could hope for.

"Hey." She plasters on the best smile she can, but it falls flat quickly. He still looks so young; shaggy blonde hair, a few spots and a couple of teeth that could probably do with braces. His eyes look so dead though; she can imagine a time when they shone with bright blue light, but now it's like looking into the depths of despair.

"Nothing out there I take it?" His voice is still wavering, through fear or just puberty, she can't tell.

She shakes her head. "If there was, we'd be moving. We're all clear again. You manage to sleep?"

The bags under his eyes reveal the lie behind his nod. "I think. A little. Between about three and three-ten."

She can't stop the frown that comes across her face. Something about him just brings out a nurturing instinct in her. Not like a mother, but more like an older sister. She sighs, rubs her thumbs under his eyes and attempts to smile again. "Next time we need to hit a town, I'll stop by a pharmacy and see if I can find some sleeping pills for you, okay?"

He raises a bushy eyebrow. "So I can be completely out cold while the rest of you are being eaten? I don't think so. I'm coming with on the next town run though. You need Tank, we both know it. He goes, I go."

Farrody's first instinct is to say no, to tell him he's just a kid. The words are on her tongue before she realises and she has to make an effort to snap her mouth shut. She remembers that she's dealing with a kid living in the new world. A little smash and grab is nothing compared to killing his entire family.

And more than that; he's right. Tank is his bronzong. It's an accurate name. Pokémon as hard as rock and steel seem to be more resistant to the monsters; they often end up breaking teeth and claws on the pokémon instead of rending flesh. So far, it seems like they're a little bit more immune to the entire thing. She's not sure if they are totally and knows that they shouldn't try their luck, but some things need to be done.

"Alright then," she says with a small sigh. "We'll most likely be heading out sometime in the next few days." If they're even still using the camp, that is. She runs her eyes over the little campsite – the _wee_ little enclosure that feels like home – and makes plans in her head. They can escape through the caves if they come from the north and vice versa. The sky is what she watches the most, other than the people scratching at a cut a little too often for comfort. Any flier that happens to be infected is practically a flying apocalypse.

She shudders away the question of how they even manage to still fly. Flying's nothing compared to everything else – the teeth, the moaning, the unflinching stare into nothingness as they eat through everything and-

-_Stop thinking!_ She balls her hands into fists and digs her nails deep enough to draw blood. She realises Tom has says something and flutters her eyelids a little, wondering if she's even caught any of it.

She comes up with nothing. "Sorry, I missed that."

He purses his lips, almost as if he's talking to a child. "I said we're ready to go at any time you need us."

"Good, good," she says quickly. She pats him on the head, laughs as he tries to wave her off with a fierce blush and makes her way towards her own tent. Further away from everyone, exposed to the surroundings and partially as the makeshift watch tent.

She tells herself she put it there because she feels like she has to watch over everyone.

Really she thinks it's so that she can slip away into the darkness if the _want_ presents itself.

Not for the first time she finds herself staring out at the landscape beyond. She fingers binoculars hanging from her neck – where'd she get them again? Ah yes, that dead ranger three towns back – and fights with herself as to whether or not she should look through them. She knows that it will help. They need to spot the monsters as soon as they can.

But she doesn't want to break the little tranquillity her camp happens to have.

And really, she knows the bigger reason she doesn't want to use them.

She still searches for Liam on the horizon.

She's just not sure whether or not she's ready to see him – dead or alive.

* * *

Ever since his pokémon finally evolved into a sceptile, Gregory remembers that whenever he wakes up, he always smells the freshly-rained-on-grass smell that his pokémon holds. She usually ends up curling up beside him in his sleep, snoring slightly and protecting him, like a mother hen and her eggs.

It's why he's slightly confused when he doesn't notice it straight away.

He groans and holds his head, in shame rather than pain, remembering everything that happened before he lost consciousness. "I'm a moron," he groans to himself.

A little hiss from his side makes him jump. He twists around to find Sally sat there, staring at him with her yellow eyes and waiting to see if he's okay. Once she's sure he is, he finds himself wrapped in the sceptile's arms and breathing in the smell of the forest she carries.

"Where are we?" he asks the pokémon.

"Our camp."

He jumps around at the voice, sees the woman standing in the entrance of the tent and recalls that he's seen her before. Her hair is black, cropped short and with long red streaks that drift in front of her face. She dresses in a blue chequered shirt and loose black jeans, with a heavy pair of boots on her feet. Her nose is a little crooked and she seems to be scowling a little –hopefully not because of him! - but he can't help but feel a little flutter inside himself that he tries desperately to ignore. It will only create nerves and make him seem like a bigger moron, after all.

She strides towards him, crouches, places her hand on his forehead and checks his temperature without any forewarning. He stares at her, wonders just who she is –wants to know her a little more – and how badly he embarrassed himself in front of her. A little part of him dreams little imaginary situations where they can enjoy each other's company… a theatre? Contest hall… cinema.

Then like a physical blow, he remembers what he's seen and realises that the world probably isn't like that anymore.

"You can close your mouth, you do realise," she says with obvious amusement. "Boundaries aren't so much an issue when you might have had a zombie bite."

He shakes his head as quickly as he can. "No bites. I'm clean, nothing bit me anywhere. I can show you if you like." His eyes widen at her grin and he gags on his tongue a little. "I didn't mean it like that! I mean, maybe I could, if you wanted it but my brain just thinks things that don't sound that normal and I'm talking too much aren't I?"

The corners of her mouth widen in a little laugh. "Calm down. Breathe. I'm not going anywhere. Neither are you. I'm Naoko by the way."

He gulps and prays that he won't make a bigger fool out of himself. "Gregory. The sceptile's Sally. Just how did you get here anyway?"

Naoko smiles and sits in front of him. "I drove. Your sceptile sat in the backseat with you in its lap."

Horror and mortification build up in equal parts. "I-she-oh," he sighs and looks at the floor. It's the only way he can keep her from seeing the bright red of his cheeks and the shame in his eyes. "I'm pretty lousy at first impressions, aren't I?"

"Very," she agrees instantly. "But don't worry about it. I guess we can make a few exceptions, given the current state of the world. A few people have done worse than fainting. It's probably the best scared reaction you can have to zombies."

He's intrigued and scared at the same time. "Zombies? They're definitely zombies then?"

She grins at something he doesn't understand. "Definitely zombies," she says, her face now flat. "They moan, shuffle across the floor, decay constantly and try to eat everyone and everything. One bite and you're gone. They're also pretty lousy with table manners."

He blows out a long breath. It all seems so unreal. He plays through every zombie film he's ever seen in his head, starts making little plans of survival and knows there's so many of them that logic say will never, ever work. Finally he reaches one conclusion and leaps out of his seat with a gasp.

"New Bark!" he shouts to the world. "I need to get to New Bark!"

Naoko gives him a look he doesn't understand. Finally she sighs and stands up. "Follow me," she says and leaves the tent.

He remains there a moment longer, stares at the empty space where she had just stood and decides that he _definitely_ doesn't like her tone. It's almost like she's about to tell him that the town's overrun by the things. He doesn't want to hear it – he knows his heart will give up on every plan when he does. But he needs to follow her. Maybe it'll be something else. Maybe the roads will just be clustered with the things on the way.

Sally growls and nudges his side. "Yeah, yeah," he says and pushes himself to his feet. "I'm going after her. You coming?" He knows it's a stupid question; she would follow him to the end of the world if she needed to.

It strikes him like a kick to the stomach that they're in that very situation.

She's ready and waiting before he even finishes the question. He smiles at her, thanks her, pulls the flap of the tent up and steps into the outside world.

He finds it's not quite what he was expecting. Though he's slightly unsure just _what_ he was expecting.

He's in a little camp in the middle of the woods somewhere. He sees a little campfire roaring nearby, something rather brown and crispy –smells like mareep – roasting over the open flames. A few people see him, force smiles and carry on about their daily toil. He forces his own smile back on his face, wonders just whether or not they're going to put up with him for long and searches out the only familiar face.

He finds her standing a little distance away, staring out into the dark expanse of the nearby woods. He calls her name as he walks after her, smiles as she turns around and nods for him to follow.

"You're not going to like what I've got to tell you," she warns him as she makes her way through waist-high weeds.

His heart sinks and freezes over all at once. "Just tell me then."

She shakes her head. "One minute. Follow me."

He watches as she climbs into a tree and starts to make her way from branch to branch. More than once he finds his gaze drawn and finds himself having to snap his eyes back to something else before she notices.

She glances down and barks a laugh. "Are you coming or not?"

He watches her a moment longer and decides she needs a quick, competitive defeat. He glances back at his pokémon. "Care to help me out here?"

His sceptile nods, grabs him and slings him on her back. She growls as he links his arms around her neck and without a moment's notice, leaps straight into the trees. He barks a laugh that contains less fear than normal and grins down at the woman still climbing up the slow way.

She leans back against the tree trunk and shakes a fist at him. "That's cheating!"

He turns around as much as he can and shouts back, "It's winning with style!"

He laughs at her curses – what does that one even _mean_? – and finds sunlight blinding him after a few seconds. Sally hisses again, clutches the tree and stares out at the landscape with critical, analysing eyes.

She makes a noise as he gets off her back to stand on the sturdiest branch he can.

_Don't trust anything._

He takes her advice to heart. He knows her better than anyone – trusts her more than anyone. Even his own parents.

Holy shit.

He's almost forgotten about them under the haze of everything else! He nearly falls out of the tree from shock, pats his pockets like a lunatic, finds his phone and curses the lack of signal it gives him.

The woman appears on the same branch as him, a large, scowling psychic stood with her. He takes a step back, leans against the tree trunk and swears colourfully enough to rival her.

"What's happened?" she asks him.

He breathes with as much control as he can muster. "The end of the world?"

She laughs, quickly, emotionlessly. "Tell me something new." She sits down on the branch, stares out just above the treeline and pats the bark nearby her. "Take a seat. I would say I don't bite, but that's lost all humour these days, as you can imagine."

"I can't get in contact with my parents," he tells her, heavy hearted. He watches her reactions slowly; tries to look for any hint that might give anything away. "They live in Blackthorn."

No flicker that would tell him anything. Just some intrigue and maybe a little boredom. Like she's heard life stories so many times lately.

Given the state of the world, it doesn't surprise him.

"I don't know what's happened there, I'm sorry," she says, eyes downcast. "I still haven't found out what's happening with my dad yet. Whether he's dead or alive, or you know, eating people's arms for the hell of it."

He makes no effort to laugh at her joke. He sits there and stares out at the distant horizon, waits for her to tell him just what he wants to know and gets slightly more annoyed with every second she isn't telling him.

"So… New Bark," he says slowly.

She grimaces. His stomach plummets and he knows once again that this is going to be bad, _horrible_ news.

"What's happened there?"

She sighs, cups her hands in her lap and plays with her fingers. He's vaguely aware of her pokémon talking to Sally. Judging from Sally's reactions, she's getting about as much information as he is.

"How long have you been away from everything?"

He shrugs, tries to figure it out in his head and wonders why it's so important all at once.

"Maybe a month," he guesses. It's been about that – really he's surprised it's only such a short trip, but supplies ran thin. "Why, what's happened since then?"

She looks up at him, eyes wide. Then again she looks down at her hands. He recognises instantly it's a nervous habit and he likes what she's going to say even less.

"You've missed everything then," she says with a paltry attempt of a laugh. "Where to start? Elm's dead."

He nearly falls off the branch from shock once more. Sally growls and curls up around him, rooting him to the spot whilst carrying on her own conversation. "When?" he all-but-shrieks. "How?"

Naoko growls and places a finger over his mouth. He turns bright red, brain thundering about a thousand miles a second and makes a tiny gesture to let Sally know it's okay.

"Not so loud!" the woman warns him. "Those zombies can hear, you know?"

He remembers all at once the aftermath at the pokémon centre. His ears are hot enough to cook food on as he focuses on making that a top learning priority. "Right, sorry," he whispers. "How?"

She shrugs. "Murdered. Don't know how, the reports all just said stabbed to death, but that could mean anything. That happened about… three weeks ago, maybe?"

He's upset to hear about it, but that isn't the main thing that concerns him. "What about the lab? The pokémon there? Are they okay?"

She plays with her fingers, not answering the question. He frowns, gets annoyed and clamps a hand over hers to stop her distracting herself. "Are the pokémon there okay?"

"I don't know," she tells him. "When this zombie thing broke out, New Bark got hit pretty hard. There's a lot of pokémon there. Somehow, the zombies just _knew_. They killed almost everyone that lived there. Now… well, they still live there, except they're not bothered as to whether or not their intestines are making a mess on the floor."

He doesn't have time for her humour. "And the pokémon?"

"Most of them died."

He falls out of the tree that time.

He's saved in equal parts by Sally and Naoko's own pokémon. Sally's underneath him before he can even register falling, using her own body to bear the brunt of the branches' wrath. The woman's psychic grabs them a second later, makes them hover unnaturally in the air and puts them down on land gently.

As soon as he touches solid ground, he falls onto it, clutches it, beats it and tears it apart. They can't be dead, they just _can't!_ He's got his pokémon there! If they're dead… they can't be. They're protected. There's someone that will make sure they're looked after.

Except the world's over now and no one's concerned about their day job anymore.

On all fours he heaves the nothingness inside his stomach. He retches, his pokémon rubbing his back as the horror of it all runs around in his mind.

His pokémon might be dead.

His _parents_ might be dead.

And he was hidden away in a mountain when it all happened.

The woman appears with her psychic nearby. They both watch him with the same understanding, somewhat pitying, somewhat guilty expression.

He stands up shakily, notices them, hates them for their expression and wipes the bile from his mouth. "I need to go," he tells them, legs unsteady beneath him.

Naoko grabs him by the shoulders and tries to hold him up. "You're not going anywhere at the moment. You haven't eaten in a while, you've just found out about the zombie apocalypse and you've thrown up possibly half of your stomach lining. You need to at least eat something before you make any rash decisions."

He knows she's right. He looks into her face, feels his stomach flutter a little more and tries to shut himself down emotionally. He fails. He feels like a teenager again with all the emotions and hormones he has running through his body at once.

He takes a breath and tries to think of things logically. His pokémon will be fine; they've survived worse and more. Herman has the habit of leaping out of his poké ball and would have let the others out to help them escape.

Gregory presses a hand tenderly to his stomach and tries his best to convince himself everything's going to be fine. "Okay. I'll eat something," he tells her. "But then if I decide to go, you won't stop me?"

She smiles as she leads him back to camp. "As long as you don't steal anything from us or lead the zombies here, I think we're cool."

* * *

Another town.

Another dead end.

In more ways than one.

Gwen sighs to herself and kicks the severed head of a rotting once-human down the street. It bounces a few places and lands with a wet splat that she's become frightfully accustomed to.

By her side a little pokémon clicks wildly as it scuttles between the mess and gore left over. The durant pokes the severed eyeball of one of the things, watches it fall apart from rot and gives the latest status report to its trainer.

"Thanks Ianto," she says, eyes not drifting from the approaching horizon. She considers how long it's taken her to reach Olivine. She's arrived faster than she thought, but she's not sure just how good a thing that is, for she can see the masses of rotting humans further in town, moaning and fighting over the fresh remains of what might have been a pokémon.

"Come on," she says quietly, gesturing towards the lighthouse. She can see the remains of previous battles laid out in front of her. People have obviously had the same idea. They could be alive, they could be dead.

Right now, she doesn't really care. As long as she can complete her goals, she finds that she doesn't care as to the fate of people she doesn't know.

Habit forces her to check her phone. Still nothing. She wonders why she even bothers to still charge it when really, she knows that they lack the signal to even make a phone call. But she needs the potential lifeline. Her parents could ring her at any time. They could let her know that they're still alive, that her brother's alive. That her mother's given birth.

Her pokémon hisses a warning for her. Instinctively she ducks low, hides behind the first cover she finds and watches with baited breath. Ianto perches atop the rock, camouflaged against the grey mesh of stone. They watch as one of the things shambles in front of them, eyes clouded, legs rotting and exposed, lungs half-eaten.

It makes no noise. It confuses her that they only moan when they see food – her – or when they're around others of their kind.

It's like they're talking.

She shudders. It's a scary thought – what would they talk about? Weather? How hungry they are? – and she wishes she could banish it with all haste.

The thing keeps moving, eyes unseeing. Slowly and slowly, it heads towards the water's edge. With the laugh building in her throat, Gwen watches as the thing shambles towards the side of the dock. It falls into the water with a mighty splash and she's lost to the giggles.

"Stupid thing," she says as she watches it flail against the currents. A single cloyster floats atop the sea, opens its shell and pierces the thing in the head with a spike of pure ice. Gwen watches the cloyster hiss at the remains of the thing, close its shell and swim off somewhere else into the sea. She wonders just whether or not wild pokémon know how to deal with the things properly, or if that was just a lucky – maybe even experienced? – shot.

She takes a deep breath and stifles her giggles. She clutches the baseball bat she robbed from someone's corpse in her hands and advances towards the lighthouse once more. Her thoughts drift to her purpose here and she wonders if her friend ever made it to this city. He always did love Olivine after all, maybe he came here before everything went bad.

Or maybe that's his blood smeared over the white paint of the lighthouse.

She turns away with the thought, tries not to imagine his face crushed under the hordes and attempts to think of happy things.

Things like kittens and puppies.

Being ripped apart by snarling, dead humans.

She sighs and scuffs her shoe against the stairs beneath her. Even her thoughts have been ruined by the things. She wants to go back to the way things were. Before the world changed. She wants to talk to her family – she wants Lily back – and she just wants to know everyone's okay. But she knows that people being okay nowadays is something that's almost never going to happen.

She tightens her grip on her weapon as she approaches the huge doors to the lighthouse. They're already wide open, exposed and unnervingly painted in blood. She glances down at Ianto, gestures and makes sure he understands before creeping into the place.

It's dead. Not in the sense of the word of getting up and eating you, but in the sense that it's actually at peace. No sound whatsoever.

It makes the hair on the back of her neck stand rigid.

Smears of blood paint the floors. Little chunks of meat are splattered against everything, even now slowly dripping from the walls. There's a chandelier of intestines hanging from the ceiling and the receptionist seems to have been torn open across her desk and then beaten back to death with her telephone.

Ianto hisses something by her feet. She nods, understands his meaning and feels a little shudder pass through her.

The things are on the top floor.

She takes a deep breath, gags on the smell of rot and something which she doesn't want to identify and turns back around. Her gut screams at her to leave the place; she obeys and leaves the dank room as quickly as she can.

It's when she gets outside that she can hear the screams.

They're coming from further ahead. Someone's still alive! There's people – living, breathing, not eating-your-face people!

And by the sounds of it, they're being eaten.

She throws Rhys' poké ball out before her. It explodes with light and reveals her pokémon just as she leaps onto its back. A quick tap of her feet and its charging towards the sounds, her durant scuttling alongside with deadly speed.

She smells the things before she sees them. They smell like they've been left in the sun for so long and a few are still falling apart even as they continue to shuffle. Quick taps on her rhyhorn command it to do exactly as she wants. Some explode into flames. Others drop, crackling with electricity. The luckier ones are just trampled by her pokémon. Her durant ploughs through them alongside her, his whole body a weapon. He spits little globules of poison that land on their faces, hiss away wildly and reduce their skulls to a weeping mess of liquid bone and brain.

She sees the screamer and directs her pokémon towards him. The things turn round at Rhys' roar and several explode as lightning bursts into them. A few more move away from the remains of someone they were eating. Ianto barrels through a number of them; zips from face to face, covered in gore and tearing through their skulls as if they were nothing more than air.

She crouches unsteadily on her pokémon's back and slaps the few she can reach with her weapon. When the time is right, she leaps off it, bat brandished high above her head like a mighty sword. The first thing turns around just in time for her to cave its face in with all the energy she can muster.

The things notice her and start to swarm. She blows a breath, hair floats up out of her face and drips lazily back on her nose again. A little tiny smirk grows on her mouth and she smacks the nearest thing in the shoulder with her bat. The thing groans and stumbles back; she takes its head off with a well-timed swing.

Her eyes widen as its head shoots off towards the sea. Just like that, her attention is back on the game. Another thing lurches towards her. She darts backwards, spins around it and kicks it as hard as she can in the back of its legs. They snap forwards, bring it down to her level and she slams her bat down into its face.

One appears behind her, its breath stinks up her air and makes her hair curl. Rhys takes care of it before she even manages to move. The thing drops to the floor, half its torso and face missing. Her pokémon roars again, slams the ground and makes pillars of stone erupt from the floor. She nods at it, crouches down and gets ready for the next attack. The floor beneath her rumbles; she grips it and her weapon as hard as she can.

There's a lurch and suddenly, she's airborne.

She spins around in the air, kicks a few things in her ascent and focuses on where she wants to land. A little shift in her weight, lean forwards here and she angles just where she wants to go.

She lands on one of the things, knees driven straight into its skull. Its friends – maybe they _were_ friends – stumble back in surprise. It gives her the time she needs. She takes her bat and rams it through one thing's stomach. Ancient, decaying matter breathes into the air and makes her gag. She turns her head slightly, tries not to throw up and has to stumble back.

In that instant, the tide is turned.

The thing falls to the side, taking her weapon with it. She screams after it, suddenly defenceless and feeling_ incredibly_ exposed.

Ianto leaps out of the ground and charges into one things' skull. He hisses wildly at them all, raises his backside and wiggles it twice in the air.

Gwen's eyes widen and in the space of a heartbeat, she's on the floor, hands above her head. Lightning crackles above her; the smell of charred flesh dances all around and she feels decayed, rotting blood and body parts rain down on her. One or two straggles shuffle around, still somehow alive. Rhys roars once more, strikes the earth and spears them on pillars of stone.

She pulls blood-stained brown hair from her face and surveys the damage around her. Total carnage, but somehow, she's still alive.

She checks herself to make sure she hasn't been bitten. No breaks in her skin – that'll leave a bruise – and nothing that seems like it will make her one of them.

She finds her bat, pulls it out of the squashed remains of one of the things and tries to shake off most of the gore. She sighs at the state of it, shakes her head and tries to see if she can find the people she tried to save.

One's dead. She can't change that – she brains them to make sure they don't come back anyway. There's a woman trying to bring life back into another one of the dead and one man huddles in the foetal position, shivering violently and whispering nothings to the air.

"Hey," Gwen says unsurely, tapping him on the shoulder with her bat. "You okay?"

He stares up at her, eyes wide and streaming tears. "I-I," he garbles weakly. He lifts a shaky hand to her which she steps away from. She frowns at him, trails her eyes over his body and tries to see if there's anything she should be wary of.

_There!_

She takes a step back and raises her bat all in one movement. It's not much, but there's still a tiny bite on his hip. It bleeds freely, pouring blood all over the floor. His other hand presses over it, shaking wildly as he tries somehow to stop it all from bleeding.

"W-wait!" he calls after her, even as she's starting to retreat. He gets unsteadily to his feet and she's on guard, rhyhorn and durant both behind her, facing down the new threat. "I'm not hurt. It's not a bite. Just a scratch from one of your pokémon."

She glowers at him. Survival instinct is one thing, but she won't have her pokémon blamed for anything. "Don't lie to me," she spits. "If either of them did that, you wouldn't have a hip left."

He says something that sounds like nothing but a gargle of his own saliva. He tries to step towards her, but she falls back, warning him, "Stay back! You're going to be one of them."

His face twists into a grimace. "No I'm not. And what are you going to do if I was? Kill me?"

She falters at that. Killing the dead is one thing. The living? She's not sure she can do that.

He lunges for her weapon.

She realises she might not be able to kill him, but she can hurt him.

She twists out of his grasp, brings her bat up and smacks him with all her might between the legs. He screams a pitch she doesn't think she can reach herself and doubles over on the floor, clearly in agony and almost definitely never able to have children again.

She steps back from him, frowning, watching and wondering just what she can do now. She can't kill him, can she? It's so hard – so easy. Snap the neck. Bash the brains. Have Rhys crush him.

She shakes her head against the thoughts. She can't bring herself to kill someone else, despite everything.

But she can't just let him turn into one of those things either.

She wants to burst into tears, just because she doesn't know what to do.

Surprise colours her face as the woman she saw before walks up to them both, produces a long, thick chef's knife and calmly thrusts it into his throat. He gags, chokes on his own blood and convulses on the floor, bleeding even more as the woman removes her knife, wipes down the blood on his jacket and stares at him.

In fact, that's all she does.

She just _stares_.

"Hey," Gwen says, inwardly hoping this time things work out better. "You hurt?"

The woman blinks as if returning to reality. Her hair is long and matted, stained bright red through dye and blood both. Bright blue eyes dance in her skull, brimming with unshed tears. She wipes an arm across her face and leave behind a smear of dirt in its place.

"More than you know," she says cryptically. "But no bites or scratches. I'm not going to become one of them. Thanks for the rescue. I owe you one."

Gwen shrugs modestly. "It was nothing."

The woman shakes her head and places both hands on Gwen's shoulders. "It was _amazing_, is what it was. Just where the hell did you learn to move like that?"

"Before…" She bites her lip and tries to hold back the flow of tears she knows will come with remembering her family. "Before I became a trainer, my parents made me do ballet lessons. I was four when I started."

The woman stares at her in stunned surprise for a long moment. Then she throws back her head and barks a laugh. "Saved by ballet? Fuck. I knew I should have done that when I was little. Well, thanks for the save. I'm Jessica by the way."

"Gwen." She glances around at the carnage around them. "Were they…?" She finds she can't finish her own question. Were they what? Friends? Travel buddies? A couple of couples? Whatever she says just feels stupid and generally useless.

"We were travelling together," Jessica says. "We were going to try and brave the sea; go to Cianwood. It's an island, right? Maybe this thing hasn't reached there yet."

Gwen turns around and points out to the ocean. "Over there? What about the water pokémon? If they get it, they can travel across the ocean. I don't think the things can swim though. One fell in earlier and just splashed until a cloyster pierced its brain."

"That's possibly the most awesome thing I've heard in a long time," Jessica tells her. She tucks hair behind her ear and stares out towards the sea. "So, I don't suppose that you know what's going on in Cianwood?"

Gwen bites her lip and shakes her head. "No idea. Sorry."

"Figures," Jessica sighs. "Well, safety in numbers, right? Mind travelling with me?"

Gwen eyes the blood still dripping from the woman's knife and barely manages to repress her shudder. She doesn't like the fact that the woman can kill normal people so easily, but at the same time, she knows that she needs someone that can.

"It's okay," she tells her. "But I'm not heading towards Cianwood."

Jessica sighs and taps her knife against her hip. "I figured as much. Going there was only a last ditch effort anyway. We've been holed up in the Battle Frontier for so long now. Everything's run out over there and there's only so much amusement you can get by using everything available to attack everything."

Gwen's eyes widen with inspiration as she climbs atop her rhyhorn. "They've got a rollercoaster there, right?"

The woman nods, watches Ianto scuttle into place on Rhys' head and Gwen feels just a little like the woman's looking at her more than her pokémon. "Yeah. I haven't seen whether or not it's working though. Riding it at this sort of time is a bit pointless though, don't you think? All the noise would attract those things."

A devilish smile crosses Gwen's face. "Who said we'd be riding them? I've always wanted to watch one of these things on a rollercoaster. Maybe the sound would attract more of them."

The woman stares at her, open mouthed for what feels like eternity. Finally she throws her head back in a laugh. "That's an _amazing_ idea! Fuck it, we've so got to try that out!"

Gwen smiles and pats the saddle behind her. "Jump on. Rhys won't bite. Fastest transport there is. He crushes everything in our way too."

"Brilliant," the woman says. She sheathes her knife, climbs atop and links her arms around Gwen's waist. "Ready when you are, driver."

She nods and tries to ignore the sudden dryness in her mouth. "S-sure," she says nervously, suddenly very aware of the other, rather warm body pressed against her own. "Come on Rhys. Straight ahead!"

With a mighty bellow he takes off, leaving behind nothing more than a dust cloud and streaks of dead human on the floor.

What none of them notice, however, is the large pokémon sticking to the shadows, face half exposed and rotting legs not hindering it in the slightest as it skulks after them soundlessly.

* * *

"Please! You've got to save me!"

Liam regards the man with a cold stare. The dead are grasping for him as he hangs off the metallic fire escape of yet another abandoned apartment building in Viridian. He does the math; figures out that with the crowd down there, it would take them maybe ten seconds to rip the man apart, feast on him and just generally reduce him to bones.

He smirks darkly and presses his foot down on the man's hands.

"What! Hey! No-no! Not that! That hurts! Stop!"

Liam barks a laugh over the man's screams. He watches with cold delight as the man falls off and to his death. The things beneath him moan in glee; within seconds the man in nothing more than a cloud of red; body torn apart and fought over by the hungry animals.

Liam makes a show of checking his watch, even though it no longer works.

"Four seconds," he says to himself. "New record! You motherfucks sure are hungry today, aren't ya?"

He leans over the safety of his railing, dangling his body just low enough to taunt them; just high enough that he's out of their reach. An insane laugh escapes his mouth as he watches them all try to reach for him, then give up and try to feast on the remains of what was once a man.

Liam jumps a few rungs up another ladder, squats down and watches the things for a little time. He needs to see how long it takes. He counts the seconds in his head as the things continue eating.

They get bored two minutes and three seconds in.

At four minutes and six seconds, the man shuffles back to life – or something like that – bones exposed, organs falling out and his face missing the lower part of his jaw.

"Huh," Liam grunts to himself. "Don't like your food when it goes bad, do ya?" He pokes his head through the largest railings, watches a few moan and groan for another meal as others shuffle off in another direction, seeking more obtainable food. He pulls free his gun, mimes shooting a few in the head and finally settles for spinning it on a finger. "You stop eating exactly half way between them dying and them coming back to life. There's got to be something there."

He laughs and bounces to his feet with a shrug. "But, I'm not a scientist. I don't care. You fucks are dead anyway." He makes it to the roof in less than a minute, drops his backpack and searches around for the one thing he needs. Eyes sparkling when he finds it, he wrestles with the pin, pulls it loose and casually tosses it back down onto the street.

"Fire in the hole," he remarks, bored.

Then the grenade explodes with enough force to send him off his feet.

He laughs as he pulls himself off the roof and sits there for a moment, feeling the building shake. Little bits of gore rain down everywhere and he plays spot-the-body-part. Bits of brain, stomach – ooh, an entire eye! – and little things that may have been toes come down from the skies above.

"Eh," he grunts, back on his feet. "I'd give that a four at best. What do you think?"

His pokémon regards him with a bored look. Blonde hair covers most of its face and drapes down over its body, revealing only what appears to be a red dress. Its skin is purple, like its covered in frostbite, and two piercing red eyes haunt from beneath its hair.

"_Who cares?"_ the jynx grunts. _"The dead are dead again. The very least you could have done was kept a few to see how long it takes them to starve to death."_

He raises an eyebrow at her. "Do you really think we've got time to watch one of those things die from hunger?"

"_I do. You are far more likely to die before me."_

He scowls at the pokémon. "Thanks for that. Remind me why I keep you around again?"

She fires a little ball of black, soul-sucking energy into the street below. It hits one of the things and shatters it on impact, splattering everything nearby with the remains of its torso. It looks back up at the roof in something like surprise before it shudders and drops to the floor, bones breaking one by one by an invisible hand. It screeches in unholy agony before finally its skull splits in two; brain and rot leaking out and onto the street.

"Oh yeah," Liam grunts. "There's that."

"_Are we leaving yet?"_ the pokémon remarks. It sashays over to the other edge of the roof and stares down. _"I am bored of this place. Everything screams in the same way when it dies for the second time."_

He shrugs and flicks the stud in his tongue against his lips. "Soon enough. We need to get ready for real combat soon though." He points across the road at the remains of a torn-up bench. "See if you can pick that up and start bashing some of these mothers with it."

She gives him a bored look as she completes the task without much thought.

"Awesome," he says happily. "Seems like you're up to scratch. All we need now is for Eve to be able to take a number of them down without effort and for Tyrael to do the same. Then we're good to go.

"After all, it'd be a shame if we died before giving Kelsi exactly what she deserves."


End file.
